This is from Prof. Ed Hartnett (Seton Hall Law School), the author of the leading Supreme Court practitioner's guide, writing about scope of injunction:
There is an important and unresolved issue about the appropriateness of an injunction providing relief to nonparties. Such injunctions are sometimes called nationwide injunctions or universal injunctions, but the concern is not with their geographic scope, but their provision of relief for nonparties--creating, in effect, a class action without meeting the requirements of [FRCP] 23, while undermining both the limitations on non-mutual issue preclusion . . . and the principle that district court decisions have no binding precedential effect. . . . Because decisions of the Supreme Court do have binding precedential effect on all courts, litigants rarely have an incentive to make the breadth of an injunction their primary contention on the merits before the Supreme Court; counsel might see stronger reasons to focus on this issue on a stay application.
