One Injunction to Rule Them All

Justice Gorsuch concurred in today’s Supreme Court order regarding the “public charge” rule for immigration, writing an opinion discussing the broader problem of nationwide injunctions. And he managed to work in a Lord of the Rings allusion. Nice touch.

Here is the original Tolkien:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

In October 2018, the Department of Homeland Security began rulemaking to implement the long-standing statutory requirement that persons likely to become a “public charge” cannot immigrate to this country. Concurring in the grant of a stay in Department of Homeland Security v. New York, No. 19A785, Justice Gorsuch recounts the confused history of injunctions in district courts in California, Washington State, Maryland, and Illinois and stays by the Ninth and Fourth Circuits. Then he writes:

If all of this is confusing, don’t worry, because none of it matters much at this point. Despite the fluid state of things—some interim wins for the government over here, some preliminary relief for plaintiffs over there—we now have an injunction to rule them all: the one before us, in which a single judge in New York enjoined the government from applying the new definition to anyone, without regard to geography or participation in this or any other lawsuit.The Second Circuit declined to stay this particular universal injunction, and so now, after so many trips up and down and around the judicial map, the government brings its well-rehearsed arguments here.

The increasingly common practice of a single judge in a single district court enjoining the enforcement of a law or regulation nationwide is a big problem. Among other things, it biases the process in favor of the views of the one judge most strongly opposed to the enactment. If 100 cases are filed, 99 judges rule the plaintiff has no case, and 1 judge issues a nationwide injunction, then the view of the 1 prevails over the view of the 99. That can’t be right. Justice Gorsuch continues,

It has become increasingly apparent that this Court must, at some point, confront these important objections to this increasingly widespread practice. As the brief and furious history of the regulation before us illustrates, the routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable, sowing chaos for litigants, the government, courts, and all those affected by these conflicting decisions. Rather than spending their time methodically developing arguments and evidence in cases limited to the parties at hand, both sides have been forced to rush from one preliminary injunction hearing to another, leaping from one emergency stay application to the next, each with potentially nationwide stakes, and all based on expedited briefing and little opportunity for the adversarial testing of evidence.

This is not normal. Universal injunctions have little basis in traditional equitable practice. Bray 425–427. Their use has proliferated only in very recent years. See Trump, 585 U. S., at ___–___ (Thomas, J., concurring) (slip op., at 8–9). And they hardly seem an innovation we should rush to embrace. By their nature, universal injunctions tend to force judges into making rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions. Bray 461–462. The traditional system of lower courts issuing interlocutory relief limited to the parties at hand may require litigants and courts to tolerate interim uncertainty about a rule’s final fate and proceed more slowly until this Court speaks in a case of its own. But that system encourages multiple judges and multiple circuits to weigh in only after careful deliberation, a process that permits the airing of competing views that aids this Court’s own decision making process. Ibid. The rise of nationwide injunctions may just be a sign of our impatient times. But good judicial decisions are usually tempered by older virtues.

CJLF takes no position on the underlying issues in this case, but we do agree with Justice Gorsuch that we need to put the brakes of excessive issuance of nationwide injunctions.