The Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc. represents a seismic shift in federal remedial jurisprudence, statutorily interring the universal injunction by anchoring equitable power strictly to the practices of 1789. While Justice Barrett's majority opinion executed this historical maneuver, it is Justice Thomas's concurrence—read in synergy with Justice Alito's—that illuminates the breadth of the conservative majority's project. This project extends beyond eliminating a single controversial remedy; it aims to construct an architecture of remedial minimalism designed to severely constrict the judiciary's capacity to check systemic executive action. Justice Thomas's concurrence is critical not merely as an endorsement of the majority, but as a strategic fortification against the doctrinal evasions he anticipates, signaling a profound recalibration of the judicial role in public law litigation.
Justice Thomas's primary objective is to preemptively neutralize the "complete relief" doctrine as a potential workaround to the majority's holding. He recognizes the inherent tension: if equity demands that a remedy fully redress a plaintiff's injury, and if that injury stems from a systemic policy where individualized relief is impracticable or insufficient, courts might justify functionally universal relief under the guise of necessity.
Thomas's concurrence attacks this possibility by fundamentally redefining the status of complete relief. He forcefully asserts that courts "err insofar as they treat complete relief as a mandate." It is, in his view, a discretionary ceiling that must invariably yield to the historical limitations formalized in Grupo Mexicano. This is a crucial doctrinal intervention. It subordinates remedial efficacy to historical formalism. If a remedy necessary to make a plaintiff whole lacks a precise 1789 analogue, Thomas argues, the court is powerless; plaintiffs must simply "make do with less than complete relief." This vision accepts the under-remediation of established constitutional or statutory harms as the necessary cost of maintaining a historically frozen conception of judicial power.
Furthermore, Thomas constricts the exception for "indivisible remedies"—where relief for a plaintiff inherently benefits non-parties (e.g., nuisance abatement). He imposes an extraordinarily high bar, requiring that plaintiff-specific relief be "all but impossible." Critically, he dismisses administrative difficulty or the chaos of patchwork enforcement as insufficient justifications. This standard deliberately ignores the realities of the modern administrative state, where uniform policies often cannot be disaggregated without significant disruption or cost—the very harms the State plaintiffs asserted in CASA. By demanding near-impossibility, Thomas ensures that the exception remains vanishingly narrow, forcing the complexities of contemporary governance to bend to 18th-century remedial constraints.
The intellectual synergy between the Thomas and Alito concurrences reveals a sophisticated, dual-pronged strategy to dismantle the infrastructure of modern public interest litigation. Both opinions are animated by a shared anxiety over judicial overreach and a desire to prevent the resurrection of the universal injunction in another form. They execute a pincer movement against broad relief.
Justice Alito addresses procedural evasion. He flags the mechanisms litigants use to achieve scale: Rule 23 class actions and third-party standing, particularly by States. Alito urges "rigorous and evenhanded enforcement" of standing limitations and warns against relaxing Rule 23 standards, aiming to restrict the aggregation of claims.
Justice Thomas complements this by targeting substantive remedial doctrine. If Alito seeks to limit who can seek broad relief and how they organize, Thomas seeks to limit what the court can award, regardless of the procedural posture. By narrowing the definition of necessary relief and elevating historical limits above remedial efficacy, Thomas ensures that even if a large class is certified or a State has standing, the resulting remedy remains tightly constrained. Together, these opinions provide a blueprint for insulating executive action from comprehensive judicial review.
The implications of this remedial retrenchment extend far beyond birthright citizenship, threatening the viability of systemic challenges across the spectrum of public interest litigation. The Thomas-Alito framework promotes the atomization of constitutional litigation. By forcing plaintiffs into individualized suits or the burdensome gauntlet of Rule 23, while simultaneously narrowing the available relief, the Court significantly raises the transaction costs of challenging federal policy.
In status-based disputes, such as citizenship, immigration, or large-scale benefits programs, this approach invites chaos. Uniformity is often essential to the rule of law in these contexts. A regime where citizenship status depends on whether an individual has secured a personal injunction is inherently unstable and administratively untenable. Yet, Thomas's rejection of administrative burden as a relevant equitable factor explicitly countenances this instability.
The ultimate consequence of this jurisprudence is a structural empowerment of the executive branch. By restricting the judiciary's ability to issue swift, comprehensive checks on executive action, the Court creates a landscape where a potentially unlawful policy can remain in effect for the vast majority of affected individuals during protracted litigation. This framework allows the executive to leverage the friction of the legal system to maintain the status quo, creating what Justice Jackson's dissent aptly describes as a "zone of lawlessness" for non-parties. Justice Thomas's concurrence, therefore, is not merely a technical commentary on equity; it is a foundational statement on the separation of powers, advocating for a judiciary intentionally constrained from addressing the systemic realities of the modern administrative state.