Abstract
The headline from last Term is that, by overruling Chevron, the Supreme Court dealt a body blow to the administrative state. The thesis of this article is that other decisions from last Term provide an important but overlooked ray of hope that the Supreme Court will protect federal agencies from unjustified judicial intrusions by putting an end to universal district court remedies.
In Corner Post v. Federal Reserve Board, the Supreme Court reserved the question whether the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) authorizes the remedy of universal vacatur. And in the cases that I dub the Judicial Restraint Trilogy Starbucks v. McKinney, FDA v. Alliance forHippocratic Medicine, and Murthy v. Missouri the Supreme Court provided compelling new reasons to reject the notion that the APA empowers district court judges to enter universal vacatur or other universal remedies. The reasoning of Starbucks shows that the APA's grants of remedial power to district court judges must be interpreted to carry forward traditional principles of equity, which include the principle that a remedy can be no broader than necessary to redress the plaintiff's injuries. The decisions in Alliance and Murthy together show that the same constraint on a federal judge's remedial power flows from Article III's case or controversy requirement. The counterarguments that Justice Kavanaugh offered in his concurring opinion in Corner Post elide the distinction between vacatur and universal vacatur. At most, his points suggest that the APA should be interpreted to authorize the remedy ofvacatur not universal vacatur or other universal remedies.
Recommended Citation
Alisa B. Klein, The Judicial Restraint Trilogy: Why the Supreme Court's Decisions from Last Term Offer New Hope for Remedial Discipline, 47 Campbell L. Rev. 1 ().