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Wall Street Journal

A Universal Injunction Compromise

Does a single federal judge, with jurisdiction over a state or a district within a state, have the authority to stop the government from carrying on an allegedly unlawful policy everywhere in the country? The permissibility of such 'nationwide' or 'universal' injunctions is before the Supreme Court in Trump v. CASA. (The case arises from several challenges to President Trump's executive order denying citizenship to U.S. born children whose parents are nonresident aliens.) From the justices' questions in oral arguments last week, it was clear all are uneasy with the idea that trial judges have the authority to act as a 'roving commission to correct every legal wrong that they can consider and to exercise general legal oversight over the executive branch,' as Solicitor General John Sauer put it. On the other hand, requiring everyone injured by an executive action to initiate his own lawsuit to gain relief seems unduly burdensome.