Comment by mannyv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mannyv | Hacker News Reader

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You need to actually read the decision. There's plenty of legal reasoning. You may not agree with it, but your opinion is irrelevant.

One thing they didn't talk about was structural: the court system is split up into X circuits, and each circuit is independent. Normally each circuit uses rulings from other circuits as a basis for its judgements, but circuits are pretty independent from each other. The Supremes weigh in when the circuits conflicted with each other.

The national injunctions issued by the lower court allowed the lowest level court to have more authority than an appeals court. An appellate court's decision was only binding on its circuit. Why would a lower court have more authority than an appeals court? That makes no sense.

That's outside of all the reasoning the court used to stop this practice.

That said, if an affected individual brought a suit the may be able to get an injunction, since the court ruled that universal injunctions were inappropriate.

>Why would a lower court have more authority than an appeals court? That makes no sense.

An appellate court considers the decisions of the courts below it, so it makes sense its actions would be restricted to those courts. What makes no sense is the newly possible situation in which an action violates the U.S. Constitution in one district but not another.

> What makes no sense is the newly possible situation in which an action violates the U.S. Constitution in one district but not another

That's not new. It's called a circuit split, and generally results in the cases being combined when SCOTUS hears them to sort out the difference.

>That's not new. It's called a circuit split, and generally results in the cases being combined when SCOTUS hears them to sort out the difference.

Absolutely. As it should be.

The problem here is that the SCOTUS decision under discussion here makes it less likely (perhaps quite unlikely) that the SCOTUS will even be asked to "sort out the difference."

That's because their ruling today made it clear that if you're not a named plaintiff in a suit against the government, you are not subject to/protected by any ruling on that case, unless and until, a SCOTUS ruling sorts it out.

And since the prevailing party has no standing to appeal (only the "losing" party -- party as in plaintiff/defendant, not political party), if the Executive Branch doesn't appeal, SCOTUS will never see such cases -- thus leaving the Executive branch to do literally anything with impunity outside the realm of the circuit court involved.

>an action violates the U.S. Constitution in one district but not another.

aren't those cases the point of the Supreme Court? when districts conflict it goes to the Supreme Court.

Distinctly no, this is in the dissent. That requires an appeal from the government and for SCOTUS to pick up the case in a reasonable time.

Now the government can choose to "lose" in some places and let the injunction stand. Then, in all other locations in the country, the constitution of the United States is quite literally different in perpetuity.

And it's not even by-locality, sans cases brought by a state government. SCOTUS has defined injunctions as by-litigant. So now two babies born next to each other in the same hospital to visa parents can have different naturalization statuses based on if those parents had sued in the right district court or not.

This makes US law effectively intractable. The only natural resolution then is to visit Obergfell - the gay marriage case that the current SCOTUS majority has harped against for years in their rulings - and resolve the conflict by appealing to the federal nature of the law & enforcement, revoking citizenship of even those with an injunction.

In another comment I've gone into detail on exactly how the federal government can force that case to the SCOTUS.

If the law is universal then it makes sense that courts can rule universally. If the law is arbitrary and every judge is basically a ruler of their own domain, which directly conflicts with the idea of Rule of Law, then it would be invalid for a lower court to make universal rulings.

It is precisely the universality and supremacy of the law which gives the lower courts the authority to make universal rulings. Just because something is federally illegal in one federal district doesn't mean it is legal in another.

The lower court doesn't have more authority than the appellate court if the appellate court can overturn the lower court.

No court has the "authority" to make arbitrary unlawful rulings.

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