Introduction
Article III protects federal judges with life tenure and salary guarantees.1 But politics still impacts federal courts, especially the Supreme Court. This influence is transmitted through presidential elections; Senate confirmations; congressional control over the Court’s size, appellate jurisdiction, and remedies; and presidential threats to defy the Court’s judgments or opinions.2 These pressures help explain why the Court’s jurisprudence has often been sensitive to major political concerns.3 They also explain why the Court sometimes accommodates short-term political threats even as it seeks to preserve its own power and legitimacy over the longer term.4
The Supreme Court and lower federal courts in 2025 faced political hostility redolent of prominent past challenges to judicial authority.5 President Trump has issued a historically large number of executive orders and engaged in other executive actions premised on a very broad conception of executive power.6 In the avalanche of responsive lawsuits, lower federal courts enjoined the orders and actions on an unprecedented scale, often on a universal basis.7 The Trump Administration verbally accosted these courts, called for impeachment of judges, gamed judicial orders, and appeared to threaten defiance.8 Members of Congress were similarly hostile.9 Commentators worried that these events signaled that the executive branch would disregard judicial decisions, including Supreme Court decisions.10 Some Justices worried about the same thing.11
The Court did not respond to these challenges via “merits” decision-making — a slow and diminishingly relevant mechanism to redress contemporary executive power challenges. Rather, it responded with interim orders that ruled on applications to stay or vacate lower court injunctions, or to grant injunctive relief, against the government. This Essay focuses on the eighteen such orders that the Court issued in the first seven months of the second Trump Administration, from January 20, 2025, through August 20, 2025. Interim orders typically come very early in a case and determine the legal status of the executive action in question during the oft-lengthy period between filing and Supreme Court review of a final judgment. They sometimes even resolve a case. And they can have a broad stare decisis impact on lower courts even though they typically contain little reasoning and are not decisions on the merits.
The presidency-related interim orders under study built on a decade of significant interim orders by the Court that have responded to two general trends. First, executive branch activism, fueled by a robust conception of presidential administration, reached new heights in the face of congressional dysfunction.12 Second, lower courts issued an unprecedented spate of universal injunctions and related remedies in response to executive initiatives.13 The Court engaged these trends with a discretion-laden form of judicial decisionmaking that is procedurally truncated and short on explanation but nonetheless very significant in impact. The Court’s 2025 orders contain many innovations in this evolving form of adjudication.
The dominant theme in the Court’s 2025 orders is the protection and enhancement of its ultimate authority to interpret federal law. Horizontally, where judicial supremacy is vulnerable, the orders negotiated the complex space between vindicating the Court’s view of federal law and keeping a minatory President in compliance with that law and the Court’s rulings. Vertically, where the Court’s supremacy is robust but not always efficacious, the orders tightened its early control over lower courts’ responses to executive action, enabling it to shape the judiciary’s collective stance. These twin efforts came to a head in the Court’s invalidation of universal injunctions in the interim order opinion in Trump v. CASA.14 The ruling eliminated a lower court tool to block presidential programs, extracted a historic executive branch pledge of fealty to Supreme Court “judgments and . . . opinions,” and clarified the Court’s conception of its supremacy in other ways.15
This Essay proceeds as follows. Part I introduces Supreme Court interim orders and the dispute over universal injunctions. Part II analyzes the presidency-focused orders issued by the Supreme Court during the period under study. Though the executive branch prevailed in the vast majority, the evidence does not support the view that, as some have claimed, the Court is appeasing a law-breaking presidency. Part III focuses on how the Court enhanced its vertical control over the lower federal courts through important innovations in its interim orders practice. Part IV examines CASA. It questions the Court’s method for determining the validity of equitable remedies like universal injunctions, assesses the decision’s impact on the Court’s interim orders practice going forward, and analyzes how CASA surfaced and tentatively resolved one of the hardest questions in constitutional law — the nature of the President’s duty to abide by Supreme Court decisions.
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* Learned Hand Professor, Harvard Law School. For comments and conversation, I thank
Jonathan Adler, Will Baude, Rishabh Bhandari, Sam Bray, Brian Fletcher, Matt Gluck, Bert
Huang, Tom Koenig, Chris Moore, Jim Pfander, Rick Pildes, Richard Re, Thomas Schmidt, Mila
Sohoni, Cass Sunstein, and Adrian Vermeule. For research, I thank Kristijan Barnjak, Daniel
Freedline, Bryce Klehm, Myles McKnight, Sean O’Neil, Akhil Rajasekar, and Andrew Reed.