In the birthright citizenship cases, the Supreme Court today issued a 32-page 6-3 opinion that didn’t touch the merits (and produced 21 pages of concurrences and 65 pages of dissents).  But the procedural issue it did decide may end up just as important: the availability of universal injunctions, injunctions that grant relief to parties other than the plaintiffs.  The Court said that federal courts likely do not have the authority to issue universal relief as part of their general equitable power granted by the Judiciary Act of 1789.  And like the new 2d Amendment originalism, the opinion features yet another fight over exactly how close a historical analog might be to the particular circumstance we’re addressing today.

This isn’t the complete end to relief beyond the particular plaintiffs. In fn 10, the Court specifically punted on relief vacating federal agency action under the Administrative Procedure Act. And I don’t believe that any of the Court’s analysis affects the ability of state courts to issue equitable relief of various kinds.

The Court’s decision may well have an impact on election cases as well, as Derek has recently pointed out.  (Many election cases up to now have focused on the lawfulness of the government action and not the tailoring of relief to the particular plaintiffs.) At least in federal cases, we’re likely to see more fights over class actions – and even more tailoring of the tailoring analysis in Anderson-Burdick-Crawford balancing, based on the tailoring of the plaintiff class.

(UPDATE: for just one example of how this might work, this Frank v. Walker complaint from 2011, challenging Wisconsin’s voter ID law, was specifically styled as a class action. And/but this takes an enormous amount of time and effort, both to prepare and to litigate.)