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The ruling only has binding precedent in the 5th Circuit, other circuits aren't bound to follow it. Formerly this kind of ruling would come with a nationwide injunction to force the issue but now that those are severely curtailed by the Supreme Court it's only binding to the courts under the jurisdiction of the 5th circuit.

Decisions in other circuits can be very persuasive to other circuits but they're not required to agree the same way a Supreme Court ruling is binding. Circuit splits are moderately common and usually trigger a review by the supreme court if an appeal wasn't filed for the earlier decisions.

by rdbl272 days ago|

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Nationwide injunctions are a very recent legal innovation -- as in, extremely rare until the 2000s, and uncommon until the 2010s.

They were not how this situation was handled for nearly all of the existence of the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_injunction

by rtkwe1 days ago|

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Seems like a perfectly valid one. If the government is violating the constitution or a persons rights why should there be suits all across the country to get that recognized? Especially when the question isn't on something with a lot of particularized tests that's sensitive to the exact case, eg 4th amendment law? Why should rights be so dependent on someone in my particular part of the country having sued?

by lmm1 days ago|

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> If the government is violating the constitution or a persons rights why should there be suits all across the country to get that recognized?

Because one judge in one county shouldn't be defining the laws for the whole country? Sure it's great when they issue a ruling you like, but what about when it's a ruling that you don't. If it's a knife-edge situation then letting several judges rule and having the supreme court sort it out is the right thing; if there's an obvious right answer then every court will rule the same way and it doesn't matter.

> Why should rights be so dependent on someone in my particular part of the country having sued?

Your rights are always dependent on your willingness to sue to defend them. It's nice if someone else does the legwork and sets the precedent, but you shouldn't depend on that.

by rtkwe1 days ago|

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It's rarely down to one judge in one county though, most are entered pending appeal and the appeals court can immediately put the injunction on hold or in cases like this the first injunction might come from a circuit court who's far from one judge, by the time it gets to a circuit it's gone through multiple judges and some cases are heard by a bank of judged instead of just one.

> Your rights are always dependent on your willingness to sue to defend them. It's nice if someone else does the legwork and sets the precedent, but you shouldn't depend on that.

I don't have a spare million sloshing around even if I could get granted standing for various things I would like to defend. It's not just a problem of willingness.

by lmm15 hours ago|

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> It's rarely down to one judge in one county though, most are entered pending appeal and the appeals court can immediately put the injunction on hold or in cases like this the first injunction might come from a circuit court who's far from one judge, by the time it gets to a circuit it's gone through multiple judges and some cases are heard by a bank of judged instead of just one.

When the circuit court rules the ruling is binding on that whole circuit, which is a pretty huge area and population (bigger than most countries). When one judge in one county rules the ruling is binding in that county, when the supreme court rules it's binding on the whole country. Isn't that kind of how it should work?

by hansvm1 days ago|

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On the other side, why should one crazed/corrupt judge in some state which has nothing to do with me be able to infringe on my freedoms and make my life worse? Worse, why is it possible to jurisdiction shop for the single bad actor and impose your will on the entire country?

You're not wrong, but (like most issues in a 350M-person country) it's complicated. The system is tailored to some expected level/type of corruption and bad actors. If you expect that the government is basically fine and that out of 50M people per region surely somebody will file suit if the issue is important then the current system makes a lot of sense. You get judges with more knowledge and awareness of your local issues, anything important still gets addressed, and you're resilient to some degree of random bad judges and bad actors. If those expectations are out of whack then you get worse outcomes.

In reality, the world is complicated enough that even boiling down the lists of judges and whatnot to that simple of a description is misleading at best. Neither solution is anywhere near optimal by itself. So...what next?

by rtkwe1 days ago|

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Yeah it's a definite mixed bag and maybe the solution is to require them to be approved by at least a multijudge panel at the circuit level before going in to place. In effect that basically already happened though, the normal pattern was for injunctions to be stayed for a few weeks pending the appeal and the appeal court would be able to extend that stay if they believed it was flawed or unjustified. The characterization of it being "one crazed judge" doesn't really hold up to the pattern of their actual use, and where judges didn't put in a stay the appeals court could as well.

by bluGill2 days ago|

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Only the 5th court of appeals. However if you get caught elsewhere your lawyer will have a good appeal grounds just because your area will need to decide if they agree. If all areas eventually agree it probably never will get to the supreme court. Once several different courts hear this and make a decision if they disagree the supreme court jumps in reading all the logic of everyone below them to try to find a real answer. (It doesn't always work this way, that is the textbook ideal way, but the real world is often different).

Note that unless you think nothing of spending 20 million dollars on lawyers this is probably not something that you want to fight.

by gmiller1234562 days ago|

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Appeals court decisions generally only apply to their own jurisdiction. But they obviously hold a lot of weight when cited in others.

by malfist2 days ago|

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Prior to this year, the entire country. Today, thanks to SCOTUS shenanigans, it likely only applies to the states involved in the lawsuit, LA. But who knows, hard to keep up with the game of calvinball the SCOTUS is playing.

by dcrazy2 days ago|

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You seem to be confusing precedent-setting decisions with nationwide injunctions.

by rtkwe2 days ago|

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Probably though the old pattern was that the plaintiffs would request and the Circuit would issue a nationwide injunction with the ruling when finding that a law in full unconstitutional.

Now we have the weird situation where the constitution is more patchwork because you have to get rulings in all the Circuits or wait for one case to make it all the way to the Supreme Court.

by rdbl272 days ago|

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No, that was never the old pattern. Nationwide injunctions were unheard of until very recently -- as in, within the past 10-20 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_injunction

by malfist2 days ago|

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Your own source says they've been common since 1960

by dcrazy1 days ago|

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It doesn’t say that. It says that the D.C Court of Appeals issued one in 1963, and then quotes the DOJ as saying “ nationwide injunctions remained ‘exceedingly rare’ for a few decades after 1963[,]” notwithstanding one issued by a district judge in New York in 1973.

Regardless of what you think about nationwide injunctions, your original assertion that “prior to this year,” a decision by a federal appellate court would apply the entire country is categorically false.