The US Supreme Court’s decision has upended the use of nationwide injunctions, which federal district courts have increasingly issued to block implementation of law or policy against anyone, even non-parties.
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The US Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision on 27 June 2025 that so-called “universal injunctions” exceed the authority of federal courts under the Judiciary Act 1789. The court did not address the substance of an executive order on birthright citizenship, the enforcement of which three different federal district courts had preliminarily enjoined. Those injunctions were each upheld on appeal, and the US government subsequently appealed to the US Supreme Court.
The conservative majority of the US Supreme Court granted partial stays of the preliminary injunctions, “but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.” The court also stayed the prohibitions on the government’s development and issuance of guidance on the implementation of the executive order.
The narrow issue before the court was thus “one of remedy,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion.
Barrett wrote that the “federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them.” That authority, she wrote, is in the Judiciary Act, which “endowed federal courts with jurisdiction over ‘all suits . . . in equity’.”
The problem, the court explained, is that the equitable authority of federal courts is limited to remedies “traditionally accorded by courts of equity,” citing the 1999 US Supreme Court opinion in Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo v Alliance Bond Fund.
The majority concluded that universal injunctions are not analogous to the traditional equitable remedies issued by the High Court of Chancery in England in the late 18th century – the time of the founding of the US and the enactment of the Judiciary Act. Barrett observed: “Of importance here, suits in equity were brought by and against individual parties.” That would then lead to party-specific equitable remedies, which are practices that early US federal courts also adopted, she wrote.
Barrett added that “[t]he universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history. Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority.”
Increase in number, importance of universal injunctions
According to the court’s opinion, though universal injunctions aren’t a traditional remedy at equity, they have become increasingly common in federal litigation in the 21st century. Or rather, they had become common until today’s decision.
The court rejected the respondents’ arguments that universal injunctions are analogous to decrees resulting from a bill of peace, are consistent with courts of equity fashioning complete relief for the parties, and serve policy ends. The dissenting justices were more accepting of those arguments.
Some amici, like Alan Morrison of George Washington University School of Law, took similar positions, suggesting that a totality-of-the-circumstances approach would be more appropriate than a one-size-fits-all approach to determine whether to grant universal injunctions.
Remedies limited to parties
The practical import of the court’s opinion on universal injunctions is that challenges to direct presidential actions like executive orders can only yield relief to parties in the judicial action. Non-parties are firmly on the outside, looking in. Other sub-regulatory rules and guidance would also appear to be subject to the same equitable limitations.
Crucially, however, the majority opinion states in a footnote that “[n]othing we say today resolves the distinct question whether the Administrative Procedure Act authorizes federal courts to vacate federal agency action.” In the APA context, “universal vacatur” is very much alive and well because, as the court points out, the applicable statute specifically authorises that remedy.
That remedy was implicated in the US Supreme Court’s 2024 opinions in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and Corner Post v Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
Counsel to US government
US Department of Justice
Solicitor General D John Sauer in Washington, DC
Counsel to CASA, Inc
Institute for Constitutional Advocacy & Protection
Kelsi Brown Corkran and William Harold Powell in Washington, DC