Universality as judicial impatience and control

Universal injunctions reflect judicial impatience and a desire of the court issuing the injunction to maintain control over a set of legal issues. Seeing disputes likely to recur, courts use the injunction to resolve all issues for all parties, rather than allowing other doctrines, designed to handle duplicative litigation, to do their work. And the reason is that those other doctrines may take awhile to reach a conclusion (that the issuing court believes is correct) and may leave control in the hands of another court.

In my forthcoming article, I argue that it is impatience with precedent. The Seventh Circuit recognizes Santa Clara will want to maintain its federal funding despite sanctuary policies, just as Chicago does. Rather than letting the process of precedent play out--having the district court or Ninth Circuit decide the issues in the separate action, perhaps using the Seventh Circuit decision as precedent; allowing courts of appeals to work through authority; allowing SCOTUS to resolve--the Seventh Circuit uses the injunction to get the singular result at once. This is both faster, because the process of building to consensus or resolution of precedent can take awhile. And it leaves the first court in control, rather than allowing another court to perhaps reject the first court's precedent.

This dispute over the contempt citation reflects impatience and a desire for control over a different limit on duplicative litigation--preclusion. The key to this case is the district court's conclusion that individual FLSA plaintiffs (and their attorneys) are in privity with the United States with respect to the validity of the overtime regulations, a dubious proposition (and, if I had to predict, the basis on which the Fifth Circuit will reverse the contempt order). But accepting that there is privity, the proper space for that analysis is issue preclusion--for Chipotle to argue in the District of New Jersey that the first court's decision as to the invalidity of the regulations has preclusive effect on the individual lawsuits. But this takes control from the first court, since "[d]eciding whether and how prior litigation has preclusive effect is usually the bailiwick of the second court."   By proceeding via injunction, the first court retains authority to decide all related issues under the guise of enforcing its injunction.