Federal Judiciary Limits Forum Shopping, Likely Hurting Future Gun Rights Cases

[Sgt Raven]

[AlmostHeaven]

In a case completely unrelated to Second Amendment issues, the Supreme Court revealed insight into its current preference against broad lower court injunctions. This attitude quite possibly affects the current posture of gun rights cases and why SCOTUS has not intervened in any interlocutory appeals.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/15/supreme-court-idaho-transgender-00152372

The opinions the justices issued Monday explaining the court's decision in the case, however, made little reference to the issue of whether such laws aimed at transgender people are or are not constitutional.

Instead, the Supreme Court's members duked it out over a long-simmering question of whether and when individual judges have the power to block enforcement of a law broadly even though only one or a small number of plaintiffs have stepped forward to challenge it.

While the justices spilled 34 pages on that issue Monday, they did not resolve it since no opinion garnered a majority of the court.

At oral arguments in various cases, Justice Neil Gorsuch has repeatedly aired his skepticism about broad injunctions, and he led the charge Monday.

"In recent years, certain district courts across the country have not contented themselves with issuing equitable orders that redress the injuries of the plaintiffs before them, but have sought instead to govern an entire State or even the whole Nation from their courtrooms," Gorsuch wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

"As in so many other recent cases, the district court's universal injunction effectively transformed a limited dispute between a small number of parties focused on one feature of a law into a far more consequential referendum on the law's every provision as applied to anyone," Gorsuch added.

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett took a somewhat different tack which expounded on some of the factors the high court considers or should consider, but did not stake out the same hostility to broad injunctions that Gorsuch evinced.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor explicitly declined to join in Gorsuch's generalizations about statewide and nationwide injunctions and said the court order here appeared aimed at protecting the anonymous plaintiffs rather than impacting other parties.

"The questions raised by 'universal injunctions' are contested and difficult. I would not attempt to take them on in this emergency posture, even in a case that actually raised the issue," Jackson wrote in a dissent joined by Sotomayor.

Jackson and Sotomayor also suggested that the Supreme Court should generally defer to appeals courts on such emergency requests, although Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said such a presumption would not always be wise.

While Kagan indicated she would've rejected Idaho's request to begin enforcement of the law, she did not join Jackson's opinion, nor did Kagan offer any explanation of her stance.

The Idaho measure was supposed to take effect on Jan. 1 but was temporarily blocked by U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, in December after families of two unnamed transgender girls sued the state in May. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision in January. Idaho officials submitted an emergency application in February to Justice Elena Kagan, who oversees that judicial circuit, to let the state enforce the ban.

At the Supreme Court, Idaho elected not to challenge the lower court's ruling with respect to the two minor plaintiffs, while fighting the broader impact.

...

The Supreme Court has largely stayed out of cases relating to gender-affirming care for minors, but pressure has been mounting on the high court to weigh in as judges across the United States have ruled differing opinions on whether these bans violate the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.