In the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term, nearly every strike of the president’s executive authority has been met with litigation that has, in some cases, paused his actions nationwide. But on Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to the lower courts, restricting federal judges’ ability to issue early, temporary rulings that apply across the country.
The decision could change the course of education-related cases that have been trickling through the courts since Trump returned to office in January—and affect how legal challenges are brought against the administration in the years to come. It’s also part of a much longer, and largely unsettled, history on how much power one judge has.
The court’s ruling on universal injunctions—also known as nationwide injunctions—came as part of its emergency order on a challenge to Trump’s executive action ending birthright citizenship. The majority opinion, penned by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, argued that such universal action—which has grown more common, particularly since the George W. Bush administration—“falls outside the bounds of the federal court’s equitable authority.”
“When a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” she wrote.
The high court’s decision will take effect 30 days after the June 27 ruling date.
In the months since Trump returned to office, multiple courts have issued injunctions to block policies from the president and U.S. Department of Education—ranging from the administration’s halving of the agency’s staff to its attempts to ban what it termed “illegal DEI practices” in schools.
Oftentimes, plaintiffs who file a legal challenge to a policy will request—and a judge might grant—an injunction to pause the policy temporarily while the full case plays out in court. Judges often limit their injunctions to apply only to those suing the administration, but some apply universally. They generally decide that a case has a sufficient chance of succeeding before granting an injunction.
Nationwide injunctions also dogged former President Joe Biden, including some of his attempts to cancel student loan debt.
“It’s a nonpolitical issue. It’s an issue of practicality,” said Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina who specializes in constitutional law and public education. “The decision makes sense, but it creates lots of problems.”
Where do current education cases stand?
When it comes to litigation challenging Trump’s education policies, many judges issued injunctions knowing there could be limitations coming, said Julia Martin, the director of policy and government affairs for the Bruman Group, an education law firm that represents states and school districts.
Knowing that the U.S. Supreme Court was weighing this very matter, and that Congress has been considering limits to universal injunctions through statute, judges have been applying their rulings somewhat narrowly.
In one case in which a coalition of Democratic-led states sued the U.S. Department of Education over its abrupt cancellation of pandemic-era funding, the injunction granted by a federal judge only applied to the states that sued.
In another case that challenged an Education Department letter requesting states certify their school districts had no “illegal” diversity, equity, and inclusion programming, multiple judges issued their orders pausing the policy “in ways that would avoid pushback on nationwide injunctions,” Martin said.
One order applied only to entities that employed or contracted with members of the lead plaintiff—the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association. Another applied to any state asked to sign the certification.
“That’s effectively nationwide, but they’re leaving room for there to be exceptions, and so they are framing it very conscious of this possibility,” Martin said.
There were also limitations to the Supreme Court order. In her opinion, Barrett made clear that the new restrictions on nationwide injunctions didn’t apply to cases in which those judicial orders are based on violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the process federal agencies must follow when making and enforcing policies.
In many of the education cases in which judges have granted injunctions, they have based them at least in part on APA violations, according to an EdWeek analysis of the cases brought against the Trump administration.
It’s likely the Trump administration is already asking judges to lift injunctions based on Friday’s ruling, said Kevin Welner, a professor in the education and law schools at the University of Colorado Boulder. He expects most judges overseeing cases with APA concerns will say no, he added.
“Then those cases will work their way up, back to the Supreme Court,” he said.
What does this mean for future cases, or cases still pending?
Class-action lawsuits, or cases that include several states as plaintiffs, still offer a route to rulings that are national, or nearly national, in scope, said Black.
But class-action cases tend to take more time. Lawyers need to identify members of a class, and judges need to certify the case as a class action. That could be harder for policy-related cases, Martin said.
“How do you prove, for example, that eliminating a contract at the Institute of Education Sciences negatively affects a specific teacher, or does that connection become too attenuated?” she said, referring to the Education Department’s research arm, where the Trump administration has terminated scores of research and data collection contracts and eliminated 90 percent of employees.
Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation, was not a class-action suit, Black said. The parties didn’t ask for a preliminary injunction, either. The Supreme Court took up a combined set of cases from four states. The high court found segregation unconstitutional, and its ruling applied everywhere, Black said.
“This case kind of kicks us back to old-school litigation one case at a time, one class at a time,” Black said of Friday’s Supreme Court order.
But the current moment is different, Black said. The president is taking instantaneous action that applies across the nation, and “it might be clearly unconstitutional, and then we’ve got to respond to that with a whack-a-mole.”
“Nonetheless, we’ve done this before; it just requires resources and effort,” he added. “Our civil rights organizations are obviously stretched thin right now, but I’m confident that they are going to do what’s necessary.”
The 30-day period before the ruling takes affect gives lawyers a chance to expand the scope of their cases, potentially recruiting new plaintiffs who could broaden the reach of any judicial orders.
“Even if there’s education cases that aren’t class-action or that aren’t sufficiently broad, [the] decision does not slam the door,” Black said. “It says, ‘Look, you need to go back and do a little bit more work.’”
The Supreme Court was concerned about effectively deciding cases quickly and ‘forum shopping’
In March, the Education Department announced it would shed roughly 1,400 employees and close more than half the regional offices of its office for civil rights, which investigates discrimination complaints. Those actions, along with Trump’s executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “facilitate” the closure of the department, quickly drew litigation from a number of organizations, school districts, state officials, and parents.
Whereas a handful of federal judges have declined to reinstate laid-off employees to individual Education Department divisions, a judge in Massachusetts directed the agency to reinstate all laid-off employees.
The Trump administration appealed immediately, asking for a “stay” that would keep the Massachusetts-based judge’s order from taking effect. When the appellate court denied the appeal, the administration proceeded to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is now weighing the federal court’s initial order.
It’s this particular scenario the Supreme Court majority took issue with in limiting nationwide injunctions.
“When a district court issues a universal injunction, thereby halting the enforcement of federal policy, the government says that it has little recourse but to proceed to the court of appeals for an emergency stay. The loser in the court of appeals will then seek a stay from this court,” Barrett wrote. “This process forces courts to resolve significant and difficult questions of law on a highly expedited basis and without full briefing.”
When issuing preliminary injunctions, a court is making a decision “that [it] might be wrong about,” Black said.
“That’s the important piece here—‘We might be wrong,’” he said. “This is a separation of powers issue. Should a trial court be able to stop the executive in just one trial court when they haven’t even got full merits, and there hasn’t been an appeal?”
The court also raised the concern of “forum shopping,” when those filing a lawsuit choose a jurisdiction in which they think a more sympathetic judge will hear their case and issue an order stopping a policy nationwide.
“In a similar vein, the government observes that universal injunctions operate asymmetrically: A plaintiff must win just one suit to secure sweeping relief. But to fend off such an injunction, the government must win everywhere,” Barrett wrote.
Sometimes, though, nationwide injunctions are a practical matter, legal experts say.
When an injunction isn’t nationwide in scope, some states and organizations are subject to a policy to which others are not.
In the pandemic-era funding case, a federal judge reinstated COVID-19-relief subsidies for just the states that sued. But as a matter of “fairness and uniformity,” the Education Department notified states last week that didn’t participate in the case that they could now access those halted funds as well.
It will be interesting to see how Republicans and Democrats react to the Supreme Court decision and change their legal strategies, Martin said.
For Republicans, “the court is essentially taking away one of the tools that they have also used in cases like Title IX and abortion discussions,” Martin said. “So it is certainly a double-edged sword for many of the folks involved.”
