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This column has been making the case that a single federal judge should not be able to dictate policy nationwide. Thank goodness the Supreme Court, in a majority opinion from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, took an important step on Friday to limit the use of universal injunctions. Some liberals are howling, but not all of them. Nicholas Bagley is a law professor at the University of Michigan and former chief legal counsel to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D., Mich.). He writes in the Atlantic that the Court’s ruling “is not, as the dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would have it, ‘an existential threat to the rule of law.’” Mr. Bagley notes: Barrett’s opinion for the Court begins and ends with history. In 1789, the first Congress gave the federal courts jurisdiction over “all suits … in equity.” That conferral of authority allowed the courts to grant equitable remedies, one of which is the injunction. But that grant of power was not originally understood to give courts the power to enter injunctions extending beyond the parties to the suit—still
less to cover the whole nation. Instead, the courts hewed to a more traditional conception of judicial power. They sat to resolve disputes among parties, nothing more. That tradition held sway for more than 200 years… For Barrett, the novelty was enough on its own to condemn the practice. “The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history,” she wrote. “Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority.” The federal courts thus lack the power to issue nationwide injunctions. Period. Full
stop. Mr. Bagley continues:
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