This Essay’s purpose is to show how Trump v. CASA should be read—and how it emphatically should not be read. While CASA rejected one pathway to universal injunctive relief on statutory grounds, the decision simultaneously left intact a number of alternative routes to broad relief, including complete-relief injunctions, universal remedies under the Administrative Procedure Act and other statutes, class actions, and relief based on associational and state standing.
The Trump Administration, however, has consistently advanced inflated readings of CASA—characterizing it as a far more sweeping limitation on remedial scope than the decision actually was—and has accused lower courts of flouting the decision. But a close examination of CASA’s holding, reasoning, and limitations reveals why it is a grave error to portray lower courts that issue broad remedies in the wake of CASA as acting in defiance of the decision. Lower courts that are correctly perceiving CASA’s metes and bounds and conscientiously grappling with them across a variety of contexts are not defying CASA’s mandate, but rather are doing the work that CASA left them no choice but to do. Those who depict this judicial work as insubordination whenever it results in a broad remedy against the executive branch have fundamentally misunderstood the task that CASA left to the lower courts.
By framing legitimate judicial deliberation as defiance, the Trump Administration’s rhetoric threatens to poison intrabranch dialogue within the Article III judiciary and to corrode the legitimacy of judicial review. Ultimately, CASA’s most immediate danger may lie not in its holding, but in the Trump Administration’s instrumental use of the decision as part of its broader effort to undermine judicial review across the board. A correct understanding of CASA’s actual scope—including its limitations and unresolved questions—is essential both for fending off strategic misrepresentations of the decision and also for preserving the foundational principle, articulated in United States v. Lee, that in and are bound to obey it.”
* Professor of Law and John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar, Stanford Law School. Thanks to Zach Clopton, Adam Crews, Chris Egleson, Brian Fletcher, Jack Goldsmith, Marty Lederman, Ron Levin, Jim Pfander, Adam White, and Adam Zimmerman for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. I am grateful to Lina Volin, Jason Qu, and Stanford Law School’s talented law librarians for research assistance and careful editorial support. I am also deeply indebted to the editors of the Stanford Law Review for their painstaking work on this paper. I filed an amicus brief in CASA. Brief for Professor Mila Sohoni as Amica Curiae in Support of Respondents, Trump v. CASA, Inc., 145 S. Ct. 2540 (2025) (Nos. 24A884, 24A885 & 24A886), 2025 WL 1173016.