In Trump v. CASA, Inc.,1 the Supreme Court held that federal courts may not issue “universal injunctions”2 unless “necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.”3 This holding followed a long-running debate over the propriety of “universal” or “nonparty” injunctions.4 Some scholars, judges, and elected officials had critiqued such injunctions for incentivizing forum shopping, preventing the development of the law through percolation, and operating asymmetrically against the federal government.5 Others had defended nonparty injunctions as consistent with longstanding historical practice,6 necessary for remedying widespread harm, and beneficial for uniformity and fairness in the law.7 Doctrinally, CASA ended one thread of this debate, though its practical importance is contestable. Broad relief may still be available in class actions or in challenges under the Administrative Procedure Act8 (APA).9 But there are procedural hurdles and open questions in these contexts too. Class certification is subject to heightened evidentiary standards and interlocutory appeal,10 and there are growing calls to prohibit relief for precertification putative classes.11 Scholars, and increasingly the federal government, have also debated and questioned the bases for universal vacatur under the APA.12
CASA itself, however, left a door open to broader remedies in the second clause of its holding: Injunctions may still be as broad as “necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.”13 That clause reflects the “complete-relief principle,”14 which CASA defined as the idea that courts “may administer complete relief between the parties”15 and that “[i]njunctive relief should be no more burdensome to the defendant than necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs.”16 Prior to CASA, scholarship on the complete-relief principle took multiple approaches. Some cited it as a normative justification for universal injunctions.17 Others argued that, descriptively, it provided near-total explanatory power for predicting when universal injunctions would issue.18 The principle also had critics: Professor Samuel Bray, in scholarship cited extensively in CASA itself,19 described the complete-relief principle as an “almost wholly indeterminate” rule that failed to impose meaningful limits on universal injunctions.20
CASA described the complete-relief principle as having “deep roots in equity.”21 But the term “complete-relief principle” had not been used in any case or scholarly work prior to Bray’s reference to the idea in 2017, and there has been surprisingly little scholarly attention to the principle’s origins.22 This gap is particularly notable because CASA’s methodology is purportedly historic: The opinion asks about the “historical pedigree”23 of the universal injunction “within the broad boundaries of traditional equitable relief”24 as seen in “the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act.”25 CASA’s turn to history is not novel: It is just the latest in a line of Supreme Court decisions that assess the propriety of equitable remedies and principles through a historical lens.26 We should therefore expect courts to turn to history to answer questions about how the complete-relief principle operates. Questions about complete relief have already begun to arise in the aftermath of CASA, in contexts ranging from religious freedom,27 to grant terminations,28 to the Fourth Amendment.29 But scholarship has yet to describe the history of the complete-relief principle or assess what that history means for courts trying to apply the principle after CASA.
This Note aims to fill that gap. It first traces the history of the complete-relief principle as it evolved from the English Court of Chancery to the form it took when reaffirmed in CASA. Part I documents how the chancery-era predecessors of the complete-relief principle did not operate exclusively, or even primarily, as a limiting principle on remedial scope, and that it did not begin to take on this character until a string of decisions originating in desegregation litigation in the 1960s and ’70s. Unlike the chancery-era versions of the principle, which focused on questions of joinder and pleading alongside some considerations of relief, the twentieth-century version of the principle both authorized and limited remedial scope based on the nature and the extent of the violation. CASA itself drew on both strands of this history.
This Note’s second contribution is to begin the task of fitting this history into the complete-relief principle as conceived in CASA. Part II articulates how CASA’s version of the complete-relief principle continues to authorize injunctions that grant formal relief to nonparties, not merely injunctions that incidentally benefit nonparties. It then assesses how the history of the complete-relief principle guides application of the principle after CASA. It concludes that chancery-era history sheds some broad light on contemporary applications of the complete-relief principle. However, there is a paradox at the heart of CASA’s invocation of complete relief: CASA instructed courts to turn to chancery-era history, but it affirmed a version of the complete-relief principle that has no true chancery-era progenitors.
This Note’s final contribution is to provide and defend a positive account answering the primary question that CASA’s complete-relief principle leaves open: When does complete relief to the plaintiff make it necessary to provide relief to nonparties? Part III argues that the poor fit between the chancery-era complete-relief principle and CASA itself counsels in favor of turning to the second strand of history: understanding complete relief as depending on the nature of the violation. Specifically, nonparty relief should still be authorized in cases involving “aggregate rights,” like those implicated in desegregation cases: rights where injuries to the individual can only be understood by reference to the rights of others. Applying this standard is plausibly consistent with the Court’s longstanding practice of constructing an “artificial” or “idealized” history of equity to produce determinate standards for judicial decisionmaking. The Note concludes by illustrating the workability of this principle, drawing on desegregation, voting rights, and the First Amendment.
I. A History of Complete Relief
According to CASA, the Judiciary Act of 178930 authorizes federal courts to grant equitable remedies.31 In cases assessing the propriety and scope of equitable remedies, the Court inquires into the “founding-era antecedent[s]” of the remedy in question.32 Though “an exact historical match” is not required,33 the Court’s approach “is dominated by appeals to the history and tradition of equity.”34 With this context in mind, this Part surveys the history of the complete-relief principle to assess how that history may guide contemporary applications of the principle. This Part argues that CASA’s complete-relief principle reflects two largely separate strands. Section A describes the first strand, stretching from the English Court of Chancery to premerger equity courts in the early twentieth century, where complete relief governed questions like joinder and pleading, with some relevance to remedial scope. Section B describes the second strand, emerging after the merger of law and equity through the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, where a different version of the complete-relief principle emerged out of desegregation litigation as a principle limiting the scope of remedies based on the nature of the rights implicated. As Parts II and III will argue, the second of these strands provides the most useful guidance for the principle as understood in CASA.
A. “Complete Justice”
The complete-relief principle’s earliest predecessors came from the English Court of Chancery, but the principle did not operate exclusively or even primarily as a constraint on remedial scope. Instead, in the Court of Chancery and premerger courts of equity in the United States, the principle was invoked in connection with a range of maxims, often operating expansively to bring a wider range of parties and claims before the court.
One common role for this version of the complete-relief principle was as a justification for joining parties. An archetypal and widely cited example is the case of Knight v. Knight,35 decided in the Court of Chancery in 1734. A widow brought a bill in equity against the son of the deceased, alleging that he had failed to maintain a home for her as required by a covenant on land that had been left to the son.36 She sought to compel the son to rebuild the home and to pay her damages.37 The son objected that she had failed to bring the deceased’s executor as a party; the widow argued that in a suit at law, she would have been allowed to sue the heir alone.38 Lord Chancellor Talbot rejected the widow’s argument: Regardless of the rule at law, “the court of equity in all cases delights to do complete justice, and not by halves.”39 Joining the executor “would prevent a multiplicity of suits,” so the objection was proper40 — in effect, the executor was an indispensable party. The practice of invoking complete relief to justify or require joinder of parties continued into early equity courts in the United States. Like Knight, these cases often invoked the same idea of “complete justice” and tied that idea to the multiplicity-of-suit ground for equitable jurisdiction.41 Leading equitable treatises published in the nineteenth century confirmed this interpretation: Joinder rules reflected the “constant aim of Courts of Equity to do complete justice” so that “future litigation may be prevented.”42
In addition to invoking the principle to determine what parties could be before a court of equity, courts also invoked the concept of “complete justice” to expand the claims they could consider. Though equity courts could not typically consider a legal claim where there was an adequate remedy at law,43 the complete-relief principle justified resolving those claims if plaintiffs were otherwise properly before the court: “[I]f any part of the relief sought be of an equitable nature, the Court will retain the bill for complete relief . . . .”44 Equity courts continued to resolve legal claims under this justification into the twentieth century. In Camp v. Boyd,45 the Supreme Court reviewed an antisuit injunction arising out of an ejectment action concerning three parcels of land.46 The defendant argued that the plaintiffs had purely legal title in one of the parcels, so a court of equity could not consider the claim as to that parcel given the adequacy of legal remedies.47 The Court squarely rejected the argument. As the original ejectment suit concerned all three properties, the plaintiffs “were fairly entitled to bring the entire controversy into the court of equity, so that it might be adjudicated in a single suit.”48 Citing Knight, the Court affirmed that “[a] court of equity ought to do justice completely, and not by halves.”49 Thus, if “a court of equity[is] obliged to take cognizance of a cause for any purpose,” it “will ordinarily retain it for all purposes, even though this requires it to determine purely legal rights that otherwise would not be within the range of its authority.”50
Other invocations of the complete-relief principle related more directly to remedies. Consider the rules governing equitable pleading: Whereas the common law system of writs and causes of action required precisely pleading elements of a particular claim, equitable pleading was more flexible and imprecise.51 Thus, “complete justice” was sometimes invoked to justify expanding relief beyond what was included in the original prayer. In Walden v. Bodley,52 for example, an 1840 case arising out of a land dispute,53 the Supreme Court directed on remand for the lower court to assess profits along with the issue of possession.54 While the answer “pray[ed] merely for a dissolution of the injunction,” the Court “ha[d] . . . the equities of the parties before them; and having jurisdiction of the main points” could “settle the whole matter.”55 Peck v. School District No. 4 56 provides another useful illustration from this period: There, the Wisconsin Supreme Court57 voided a contract for purchase of property for a school.58 In addition to voiding the contract, the court affirmed an injunction against the sale of property to satisfy taxes needed for the contract: The taxes could “be stayed by injunction as a proper subsidiary ground of relief, upon the principle that the jurisdiction of the court having once rightfully attached, it shall be made effectual for all the purposes of complete relief.”59
Complete relief operated most like a limit on remedial scope when it was invoked to craft remedies that imposed constraints on the plaintiffs in addition to the defendants. In this form, “complete justice” was related to another well-established equitable maxim: “[H]e who seeks equity must do equity.”60 Thus, if the plaintiff had harmed the defendant, courts could invoke complete justice to condition relief to the plaintiff on their payment of some sum to the defendant.61 For example, in Kinney-Coastal Oil Co. v. Kieffer,62 a case cited in CASA, the Supreme Court considered a dispute arising out of a federal statute governing mining and surface use rights.63 The Court affirmed an injunction in favor of the plaintiff oil company against the defendant’s use of the surface land, which was interfering with the plaintiff’s mining operation.64 But it also modified the order to require assessment of damages caused by the plaintiffs to the surface estate.65 Citing the Court’s ability to “administer complete relief between the parties,” it held both that the damages (a legal remedy) were cognizable within the suit, and that it was appropriate to assess them against the plaintiff out of concern for the defendant’s interests.66 Kinney and similar cases can be viewed as limiting relief insofar as they reduce the net benefit to the plaintiff from the suit. But even here, the principle still operated expansively, bringing a legal remedy into the Court’s equitable jurisdiction that it would otherwise be unable to assess.
Thus, from the English Court of Chancery to the early twentieth century, there was no single equitable rule called the “complete-relief principle.” Rather, courts invoked the idea of “complete justice” or “complete relief” in a range of contexts largely to expand the parties and claims over which they had authority and to modify the scope of relief that they could provide.
B. Complete Relief After Merger
These versions of the complete-relief principle began to subside after the merger of law and equity via the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) in the 1930s. Though advocates for merger emphasized retention of permissive pleading and joinder rules,67 and courts did not initially view the FRCP as having changed the requirements for equitable relief,68 over time the FRCP left the complete-relief principle in a kind of limbo. After the promulgation of the FRCP, questions about indispensable parties are now answered by Rule 19.69 Questions about pleadings and their relationship with relief are now answered by Rules 8 and 54.70 Questions about considering related legal and equitable claims together are largely (though not exclusively) irrelevant in a merged system.71 Many of these questions began to be answered by doctrines of civil procedure rather than pure application of equitable principles, reducing the need for courts to invoke the complete-relief principle for many of its original purposes.72
In the second half of the twentieth century, a different version of the complete-relief principle began to emerge as a rule of remedial tailoring based on the nature of the violation. This version emerged out of desegregation litigation after Brown as a justification for broad injunctions. After plaintiffs in these cases initially struggled to certify class actions, courts began to reconceptualize the nature of the desegregation right to justify certification.73 As one influential case put it, “[t]here is at least considerable doubt that relief confined to individual specified Negro children either could be granted or, if granted, could be so limited in its operative effect.”74 But, starting with the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Bailey v. Patterson,75 some courts took this logic to reject the necessity of class certification altogether. It was “unnecessary to determine” whether a class could be certified, because “[t]he very nature of the rights . . . requires that the decree run to the benefit not only of appellants but also for all persons similarly situated.”76
In the 1970s, the Supreme Court began to convert the idea of the “nature of the right” into a limit on the scope of relief. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education,77 the Court reviewed a district court’s desegregation order that involved busing students.78 The Court noted that equitable remedies are “characterized by a practical flexibility . . . and by a facility for adjusting and reconciling public and private needs.”79 But the Court noted that judicial power was not “plenary” and “may be exercised only on the basis of a constitutional violation.”80 As most relevant here, it stated without citation that “[a]s with any equity case, the nature of the violation determines the scope of the remedy.”81 This statement was the first time the Supreme Court suggested that the “nature of the violation” served as a guide for equitable remedial power.82 It did not directly reference the concept of “complete relief” or its predecessors. Notably, despite discussing limits on remedial authority, Swann affirmed the lower court’s district-wide desegregation order83 and suggested the “nature of the violation” as something far from a bright-line limit. Rather, sounding in the general practicality and flexibility of equitable remedies, it was a guiding standard of constraint.84
Nevertheless, Swann laid the foundation for the Court to operationalize the “nature of the violation” into a limiting principle in Milliken v. Bradley.85 The case concerned the propriety of a cross-district desegregation plan to remedy segregation found within a single district.86 The class included children and parents in Detroit, and the district court found that the Detroit Board of Education had perpetuated segregation.87 But the district court also ordered a desegregation plan covering other counties without making findings as to those counties’ liability.88 On appeal, the Supreme Court noted Swann’s statements about the practical flexibility of equitable remedies,89 but rejected the cross-district plan.90 It stated “that the scope of the remedy is determined by the nature and extent of the constitutional violation,”91 so a cross-district remedy was impermissible without a finding of cross-district illegality.92 Despite describing this as a “principle consistently expounded in our holdings,” the Court cited only Swann for the proposition.93 Like Swann, it did not explicitly invoke the idea of complete relief. Nonetheless, Milliken became the first example of the Court applying the “nature and extent of the violation” as a limiting principle on remedial scope.94
The addition of “extent” to Swann’s formula proved consequential. The Court cited the principle again in Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman,95 another desegregation case, as a rule of remedial fit: Federal courts were “required to tailor ‘the scope of the remedy’ to fit ‘the nature and extent of the constitutional violation.’”96 But the principle transformed again in Califano v. Yamasaki.97 Califano was not a segregation case. It was a class action brought by social security recipients over the government’s recoupment procedures for social security overpayments.98 The Court cited Brinkman for the proposition “that injunctive relief should be no more burdensome to the defendant than necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs,”99 connecting the complete-relief principle for the first time to this rule of remedial tailoring. It then held that nationwide relief was appropriate in the instant case.100 Certifying a nationwide class and granting its members relief was not “inconsistent with principles of equity jurisprudence” because “the scope of injunctive relief is dictated by the extent of the violation established.”101
Califano became the standard citation for the version of the complete-relief principle that governed nonparty injunctions from the 1980s through to CASA, and it can be understood as a synthesis of the two lines of doctrine described in this Part. It drew explicitly on the line of cases tracing back to Swann, which understood remedial scope as depending on the nature and extent of the violation. But the question it was answering — class certification — was about what parties could, formally or constructively, be brought before the court at all. Invoking complete relief to answer that question fits within the tradition of complete relief as a justification for broad joinder. However, Califano’s deployment of Milliken’s “extent of the violation” language ultimately “drain[ed] the complete-relief principle of any limiting power.”102 Courts would go on to cite Califano not only for the propriety of nationwide class certification, but for expanding the scope of remedies to parties not before the court whenever faced with widespread illegal action of any kind.103
CASA, too, explicitly drew on both strands of the complete-relief principle. It cited Califano,104 a case emerging out of the desegregation-era version of the principle, which focused on the “nature of the violation.” And it cited Kinney,105 the 1928 case described above, which allowed the joint adjudication of legal and equitable claims and drew on “complete justice” jurisprudence tracing directly back to Knight. Regardless of whether these strands should be connected or not, CASA connected them. What remains is to understand how that history should shape our understanding of CASA and the complete-relief principle moving forward.
II. CASA’s Complete-Relief Principle
CASA invoked the complete-relief principle by staying the injunctions below “only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.”106 But the opinion did not directly articulate any kind of test for determining when a nonparty injunction is “necessary” for complete relief. As noted above, we should expect the history of the complete-relief principle to help answer this question. This Part argues, however, that CASA viewed the complete-relief principle as a standard that both authorizes and limits nonparty relief. Because this role was not one the complete-relief principle played during the chancery era or in premerger American courts, that history can only shed light on contemporary applications of the principle at a very high level of generality. This tension leads to CASA’s complete-relief paradox: CASA limited nonparty injunctions by turning to chancery- and Founding-era history, but it bounded those injunctions with a principle that was never articulated during that period of history.
A. CASA’s Preservation of Nonparty Relief
This section argues that CASA viewed the complete-relief principle as an authorization for and limit on nonparty injunctions.107 A nonparty injunction, for the CASA majority, is one where a court grants “relief” to nonparties by protecting them formally by the injunction and allowing the nonparty to enforce the injunction via contempt.108 Such “relief” is distinct from “incidental benefits” to nonparties. For example, in a nuisance case involving loud music, an injunction that grants relief to an individual plaintiff may grant incidental benefits of quieter music to the nonparty neighbors too.109 But these benefits are permissible because the remedy is indivisible: “[T]here is no way ‘to peel off just the portion of the nuisance that harmed the plaintiff.’”110 And that injunction still grants no “relief” to nonparties, as only the plaintiff may seek contempt if the defendant violates the injunction.111
Though some commenters and courts have interpreted this distinction as CASA holding that the complete-relief principle now only authorizes incidental benefits to nonparties,112 the best reading of CASA’s complete-relief principle authorizes relief to nonparties, not merely benefits. This is so because the Court’s remand order as to the state plaintiffs hinged on relief, not merely benefits. As the Court observed, the lower court had granted the state plaintiffs a nonparty, “universal” injunction.113 By the Court’s own definition, those injunctions were defined by their grant of relief, not merely incidental benefits to nonparties. The Court held that the complete-relief principle did not justify these injunctions with respect to the individual plaintiffs.114 But, for the state plaintiffs, “[t]he complete-relief inquiry [was] more complicated,” because “the [lower court] decided that a universal injunction was necessary to provide the States themselves with complete relief.”115 It then remanded to allow the lower courts to determine whether this conclusion was correct; that is, whether complete relief to the state plaintiffs could justify an injunction binding the government with respect to nonparty states.116 This order is intelligible only if complete relief can sometimes justify nonparty relief, as was granted in the original universal injunction. On remand the lower courts reaffirmed that complete relief could justify universal injunctions in two of the three cases,117 and other courts have already begun to adopt this interpretation of CASA in other contexts.118
Another way to illustrate this same point is to compare CASA’s rule to rules that the Court did not adopt. Bray’s scholarship advocates for a bright-line rule under which courts never issue an injunction that grants relief to nonparties, rejecting the complete-relief principle as indeterminate.119 Despite the majority opinion’s explicit reliance on this scholarship,120 the Court did not adopt this bright-line rule, and instead reaffirmed the complete-relief principle. Or consider Professor Michael Morley’s proposal that in all cases necessitating nonparty relief, courts should dismiss suits by individual plaintiffs on the grounds that indispensable parties are absent, and instead require such cases to be filed as class actions.121 This rule, too, would have assumed nonparty relief is impossible without those parties at least constructively before the court as members of a class — but the Court did not adopt this rule or issue a remand order directing joinder of indispensable parties.122 It is clear that the complete-relief principle survives CASA; the best reading of the case is that the principle now operates both as authorization for and the chief limit on the scope of nonparty relief.
B. Fitting in History
This section argues that there is a paradox in CASA’s version of complete relief: Despite CASA’s focus on chancery- and Founding-era history in its rejection of the universal injunction, its affirmation of the complete-relief principle in this form can only be squared with that era of equitable practice at a very high level of generality.
CASA’s most basic claim is that complete relief is not a general grant of authority to enjoin a defendant’s unlawful conduct against nonparties,123 and this claim is consistent with history. Classic cases of complete relief as joinder of parties, like Knight, make this clear in their assumptions: It was necessary to join the executor precisely because the court could not act on the rights of parties not before the court.124 Other forms of complete relief also shared this essential character: Courts would expand the claims that they considered, or consider relief beyond the pleadings, or impose conditions on plaintiffs, but all within the context of the parties to the instant case.125 CASA thus provides a negative account of complete relief — a default rule for what it does not authorize — that is consistent with this era of equitable practice.
As to CASA’s positive account of the complete-relief principle as authorizing and limiting nonparty relief, historical practice sheds some light at a high level of generality. For example, CASA leaves open questions about the precise role that administrability concerns should play in understanding when complete relief is “necessary”;126 historical applications of complete relief to joinder of parties were attentive to administrability by stressing considerations of the “difficulty or inconvenience” of such joinder.127 CASA implies that courts should not always grant complete relief;128 history supports incorporating considerations of justice to the defendant in the complete-relief inquiry,129 but historical applications, particularly in contexts like mandatory joinder, regularly used language suggesting that providing complete relief was a goal, duty, and obligation.130
However, history paints a muddled picture here, because the historical predecessors of the complete-relief principle were geared toward fundamentally different goals than CASA’s version of the principle. As section I.A documents, from the English Court of Chancery through the early twentieth century, the complete-relief principle answered questions like: When can or should parties be joined? When can courts of equity consider claims ordinarily restricted to a court of law? What must parties plead in order to get a specific form of relief? What requirements should be imposed on plaintiffs as a condition of relief? Most of these questions are antecedent to the merits of the controversy, and the complete-relief principle is no longer the first place courts turn to answer these questions (to the extent that they remain questions at all). Moreover, the answers to these questions typically operated expansively, allowing courts to grant relief to more parties, on more claims, beyond what was pled, with more conditions. In contrast, CASA’s version of the complete-relief principle asks a different question entirely: When does providing complete relief to the plaintiff require extending relief to nonparties? This question is about the scope of relief that follows when the plaintiffs have prevailed on the merits.131 It is restrictive, rather than expansive, limiting equitable discretion by bounding the scope of relief. Because CASA’s complete-relief principle answers different questions for a different purpose than its historical predecessors, courts cannot simply turn to that era of history to answer contemporary questions about the scope of the principle going forward.
III. Complete Relief After CASA
What to do with CASA’s complete-relief paradox? This Part argues that the best way to resolve the tension described here is to adopt the post-merger version of the complete-relief principle. Specifically, nonparty relief should be understood as “necessary” under CASA when the nature of the right violated requires that an injunction run to persons other than the plaintiff.132 This Part first defines and justifies the content of this proposal using the lens of aggregate rights. It then illustrates the proposal’s application, drawing on the rule’s origins in desegregation cases and examples from voting rights and the First Amendment.
A. Complete Relief for Aggregate Rights
This Note proposes that the category of cases where the nature of the right requires nonparty relief can be understood through the lens of “aggregate rights.” Such rights are ones where the individual’s right and the injury to that right are defined at least in part by the treatment of a broader group.133 An aggregate right in this sense is, importantly, not a group right: The right itself attaches to an individual.134 But aggregate rights involve a distinctive form of individual injury where the injury “rises and falls” with the treatment of others.135 The segregation cases from which the modern complete-relief principle originated exemplify the concept of an aggregate right. As Bailey put it:
[The plaintiffs] do not seek the right to use those parts of segregated facilities that have been set aside for use by “whites only.” They seek the right to use facilities which have been desegregated, that is, which are open to all persons, [plaintiffs] and others, without regard to race.136
So conceived, an injunction that grants an individual Black student a right to attend a white school would not be sufficient; extending the injunction to nonparty students is “necessary” to provide complete relief to the plaintiff themself. This characteristic contrasts with traditional individual rights. In CASA’s nuisance example,137 the plaintiff has an individual right to use and enjoy her property. It is irrelevant to her claim whether her neighbors are harmed by the music, actively support it, or are entirely neutral — indeed, a nuisance claim could be brought even if the two parties are the only occupants of the neighborhood.138 The desegregation injunction is also not an indivisible remedy: It’s conceptually and practically easy to “peel off” nonparties and craft an injunction granting a single Black student an entry right.139 But doing so fails to vindicate the right.
The first reason to adopt this framework is historical. CASA, in its own turn to history, draws on two largely distinct historical strands in defining the complete-relief principle. As argued above, the first of those strands is ill-equipped to give content to the principle as understood in CASA. But the second strand is a natural fit for CASA’s complete-relief principle. As articulated in Bailey and Swann, it authorizes nonparty relief under certain circumstances. And as applied in Milliken, it also limits that relief: Extending the injunction to nonparty students within the district was permissible nonparty relief, but extending the injunction beyond the school district went beyond what was necessary.
To be sure, these are not chancery-era or Founding-era cases. But the Court’s recent equity cases have drawn on a wide range of historical sources, including evidence from the mid- to late nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, and sometimes later.140 In so doing, the result has sometimes been rules that did not exist in the English Court of Chancery, but that draw on legitimately longstanding equitable practice.141 CASA’s default rule against nonparty injunctions is itself an example: Though it is consistent with chancery-era history, CASA’s “sharply defined rule” was never explicitly articulated.142 Likewise, there was no rule in the Court of Chancery stating that courts may grant nonparty relief when required by the nature of the right.143 But such a rule builds on legitimately longstanding principles running through complete-relief jurisprudence, including its attention to pragmatism and flexibility, its duty-based orientation, and its antipathy toward procedural postures that beget a multiplicity of suits. That the most specific antecedents for this rule did not emerge until the second half of the twentieth century is an irony given CASA’s treatment of twentieth-century precedent in rejecting the universal injunction itself.144 But this interpretation is the best way to give effect to CASA’s interpretation of complete relief without untethering it from history entirely.
The second, related reason for adopting this framework is that it produces a definite, manageable standard for governing nonparty relief. CASA can be read as an example of “artificial” or “idealized” history in the Court’s equity jurisprudence: the latest in a line of cases converting the complex history of equity into standards “well suited to judicial decisionmaking.”145 As Bray argues, the Court’s “artificial-history approach” can be justified by the “parsimony and stability” it produces in the law: Though it “is not good history[,] . . . that does not keep it from being good jurisprudence.”146 The normative value of this methodology is beyond the scope of this Note. But it is at least a descriptively accurate account of the Court’s recent jurisprudence.147 The following section illustrates that the twentieth-century aggregate rights approach would be a determinate standard that avoids merely reinventing the universal injunction.
B. Applying Aggregate Rights
Many rights now recognized in federal courts are aggregate rights like those implicated in desegregation cases. This section traces through some examples of these rights in the context of group activities and expressive harms, illustrating how injuries have been or can be framed in terms that justify nonparty relief after CASA. This survey is not intended to be comprehensive. Instead, the goal is to illustrate that this approach to the complete-relief principle authorizes nonparty relief in a range of cases while avoiding simply reinventing the universal injunction.
1. Group Activity. — Several rights guarantee to an individual the ability to come together with others for some protected purpose. School desegregation can be understood this way: It granted Black students the right to join with other Black and white students to receive an education.
Voting rights cases present another example,148 as voters suffer injuries to their ability to coalesce with other voters to elect a candidate of their choice. In malapportionment cases, for example, the Supreme Court prohibited population deviations of a certain magnitude between different electoral districts.149 The injuries in these cases are defined by the rights of other voters: It’s impossible to say whether a plaintiff’s vote is worth “less” than another vote without knowing (1) the number of individuals who may vote in the same district as the plaintiff and (2) the number of individuals who may vote in a different district.150 Accordingly, it is also impossible to provide complete relief to an individual plaintiff asserting a malapportionment injury without extending an injunction to nonparties. Some current residents of both their district and other districts will need to lose their right to vote in that district and gain it in another in order to remedy the injury.151
While malapportionment claims are rare today, racial vote dilution claims remain viable,152 and nonparty injunctions remain appropriate in those cases for similar reasons. Racial vote dilution may occur under conditions of racially polarized voting, when voters of color get insufficient representation in government despite making up a sizable minority of the population.153 To prove racial vote dilution, plaintiffs must establish that the minority group is sufficiently large and compact to constitute a majority in a district, that the group is politically cohesive, and that white voters typically vote to defeat the candidate of choice for minorities.154 The harm155 here is defined in reference to the legal status (ability to vote) and characteristics (voting preferences) of nonparties. Accordingly, a nonparty injunction is required to grant complete relief to an individual plaintiff.
Some free exercise cases fit into this category. Consider Etienne v. Ferguson,156 a recent case where individual Catholic bishops challenged a Washington mandatory reporter law on the grounds that it illegitimately interfered with the sacrament of confession.157 The court tailored the scope of its preliminary injunction in light of CASA.158 The plaintiffs had a religious responsibility to “ensur[e] the sacramental seal is maintained by the priests in their dioceses.”159 Without an injunction that also protected the other priests, the plaintiffs could not fulfill their own religious obligations. Thus, a nonparty injunction was necessary “to afford complete relief”160 to the plaintiff priests themselves. The injunction was not broader than necessary — it did not cover clergy with no relationship to the plaintiffs or clergy of other faiths.161 But, because the rights asserted by the plaintiffs required religious activity with nonparties, a nonparty injunction was appropriate. Many religious rights require group activity; Etienne provides a potential model in such cases for applying the complete-relief principle to justify limited nonparty relief after CASA.
Etienne is also notable for illustrating the possibility of nonparty relief when class certification is not obviously available. The court granted nonparty relief to a group of individuals with different interests: The bishops, harmed via the impact on their supervisory responsibilities, were not obviously representative of the priests, harmed via the impact on their confessionals with parishioners.162 Though many aggregate rights may be obvious fits for class actions, not all of them will be — in such cases, the complete-relief principle may play an important role.163
2. Expressive Harm. — Several cases recognize plaintiffs’ rights to be free from certain expressive or stigmatic injuries. Brown164 adopted a version of this theory of harm for segregation itself.165 When a policy communicates inferiority to a plaintiff because of a particular trait, it is not enough to enjoin the policy with respect to that plaintiff: Its continued enforcement against others with the same trait communicates the same message. Thus, no remedy other than a nonparty injunction provides complete relief.
Gerrymandering cases provide another example of this theory. In Shaw v. Reno,166 the Court articulated the harms of racial gerrymandering as a species of racial classifications, resulting in the “stigmatiz[ation of] individuals by reason of their membership in a racial group,” the “incite[ment of] racial hostility,”167 and the “reinforce[ment of] racial stereotypes.”168 Complete relief to an individual plaintiff therefore requires not only exempting them from the classification — for example, by drawing a plaintiff near the border out of the district, or by granting an individualized exception to vote in a different district — but also requires protecting nonparty rights to eliminate the message of inferiority that creates the injury.169
Establishment Clause claims may also involve expressive harms.170 The travel ban litigation from the first Trump presidency offers a useful illustration of how CASA modifies the analysis. Consider the Fourth Circuit’s opinion in International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump.171 The version of the ban in question had barred entry to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries;172 the opinion stated that it “drip[ped] with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.”173 In upholding a nationwide injunction, the court relied on several factors like plaintiff dispersion and national uniformity in immigration enforcement174 that likely do not survive CASA as justifications for nonparty relief. But the court also noted that the expressive elements of the claim presented unique considerations. “[E]njoining [the order] only as to Plaintiffs would not cure the constitutional deficiency,” the court wrote, because “[i]ts continued enforcement against similarly situated individuals would only serve to reinforce the ‘message’ that Plaintiffs ‘are outsiders, not full members of the political community.’”175 A nationwide injunction was thus “necessary to provide complete relief.”176 Though this analysis invoked the interests of nonparties, that doesn’t render it inconsistent with CASA: Their interests are considered only insofar as they indicate continued harm to the plaintiffs.
Expressive harms need not stem from a classification to warrant nonparty relief under this theory of harm. In Romer v. Evans,177 for example, the Supreme Court affirmed a statewide injunction178 preventing enforcement of a referendum that prohibited local governments from enacting antidiscrimination ordinances based on sexual orientation.179 The majority noted that the amendment “impos[ed] a broad and undifferentiated disability on a single named group” and was “inexplicable by anything but animus.”180 Enjoining the enactment with respect to just one plaintiff (or their town) would not remedy the expressive harm: Their individual right to equal protection was infringed not only by harm to themself, but also by harms to others that resulted from governmental expression of animosity based on their status.181 Or take Decker v. O’Donnell,182 an Establishment Clause case where individual taxpayers challenged the payment of public funding to private religious schools.183 The district court issued an injunction partially based on the government’s “entanglement” with sectarian education,184 and the Seventh Circuit affirmed a nationwide injunction against the program.185 This nonparty injunction can also be justified in terms of expressive harm. The government’s conduct toward nonparties, the schools receiving funding, produced the expressive harm to the plaintiffs; without an injunction binding the government with respect to those nonparties, it would have been impossible to remedy the injury.
This analysis is still bounded — invoking the “nature of the right” does not mean that all antidiscrimination cases or all First Amendment cases necessarily justify nonparty relief. For example, while Romer authorized nonparty relief in an LGBT discrimination case, not all such cases require such relief. In Obergefell v. Hodges,186 individual plaintiffs primarily asserted individual harms, like the inability to adopt as a couple; even some plausibly dignitary harms were individually targeted (for example, exclusion of a plaintiff from his husband’s death certificate).187 Accordingly, when injunctions issued following Obergefell, they did not always bind nonparties.188 After CASA, with only individualized injuries presented, an injunction likely couldn’t bind nonparties, even when the injury resulted from discrimination and stigma.
Similarly, not every Establishment Clause case warrants nonparty relief. In cases challenging government displays of religious material, the Court has characterized the injury as partially expressive, “showing a purpose to favor religion . . . [and] ‘send[ing] the . . . message to . . . nonadherents “that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community.”’”189 But here, the Establishment Clause does not act as an aggregate right: An individual plaintiff may be injured by the message regardless of whether other individuals receive the message the same way. An injunction here functions like the “abatement” of a religious “nuisance,”190 with potential incidental benefits if other individuals happen to feel similarly harmed. But those other individuals are irrelevant to the individual plaintiff’s claim: The nature of the right does not warrant nonparty relief, even if it allows nonparty benefits.
Conclusion
The paradox of CASA is that it strikes down universal injunctions on historical grounds while preserving and elevating a version of the complete-relief principle that is difficult to find precedent for in the English Court of Chancery or Founding-era courts of equity. But the Court’s equity jurisprudence has long used a somewhat artificial history of equity. Relying on history from the twentieth century allows for a coherent reading of CASA’s complete-relief principle that imposes meaningful limits on nonparty injunctions while preserving courts’ ability to remedy injuries to individuals that are inextricably bound up with treatment of groups. Though it remains to be seen how courts will apply CASA’s complete-relief principle when presented with different facts on the ground, space remains for nonparty relief to continue providing “complete justice” when harms recognized within the courthouse can only be understood with an eye to harms occurring outside it.