Volume 44, Issue 2
By Riler M. Holcombe
Trump v. CASA, Inc. substantially limited federal district courts’ ability to issue universal injunctions to halt questionably lawful executive actions, reasoning that these injunctions lack sufficient historical pedigree for the Judiciary Act of 1789 to authorize them. But does the history at the heart of CASA hold up? This Note adds to the chorus questioning CASA’s history by recalling government by injunction, a period of sweeping judicial control over labor unions, their leadership, their members, even entire local communities. It explains how and why, procedurally, government by injunction came about, thereby allowing federal and state courts to bind not just the parties to a suit, but “all persons whosoever.” It also examines the crossover of this procedural liberalization from equity to law and its lasting effects on the American view of party capacity to suit, which was eventually included in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Finally, it adds to the historical pushback against CASA and argues that the extraordinarily broad non-defendant-confined injunctions issued during the reign of government by injunction support the legality of non-plaintiff-confined universal injunctions in modern administrative law contexts.
Note,
* Yale Law School, J.D. 2026. All my thanks to Professors John F. Witt, Kathryn James, and Nicholas R. Parrillo, whose courses collectively inspired this work, and to the editors of the Yale Law & Policy Review for their excellent comments and meticulous editing.
