Conservative legal scholar Jack Goldsmith revealed that the U.S. Supreme Court relied on an incorrectly cited statute to justify its shocking birthright citizen ruling.
Goldsmith, a former United States Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel under the George W. Bush administration, wrote that the decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett containted a key error, as Slate legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern summarized.
“Justice Barrett’s opinion in the universal injunction case rests on an error: For the purposes of historical analysis, she looked at the wrong statute and got the relevant date wrong by nearly *a century,*” wrote Stern on Bluesky Tuesday.
Goldsmith’s analysis looked at 18 interim orders that deal specifically with President Donald Trump’s administration. Notably, he specified that the cases involving a kind of ban on universal injunctions came amid lower courts’ efforts to temporarily pause Trump’s executive orders from going into effect until after they can be litigated.
The ruling in June stated that injunctions should only affect those involved in legal challenges, and shouldn’t be applied over huge swathes of the public.
It specifically referred to injunctions involving challenges to Trump’s attempts to limit birthright citizenship — a Constitutional law that states anybody born in the U.S. is a citizen. It said injunctions could only affect individuals or groups involved in the legal action, not the nation as a whole.
“The Court stated that Section 11 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 ‘endowed federal courts with jurisdiction over ‘all suits . . . in equity,’ and still today . . . ‘is what authorizes the federal courts to issue equitable remedies,’” the article cites the ruling.
However, he noted, it appears the Court didn’t look at the text or context of Section 11 when making its ruling.
“The Court’s claim that equitable remedies are authorized by Section 11 and thus ‘must have a founding-era antecedent’ is novel,’” the article continues, meaning that it’s new or unusual. “It [is] also questionable since Section 11 cannot have authorized equitable remedies in CASA.”
That’s when Goldsmith drops the hammer, saying “Section 11 is a jurisdictional statute” and that the jurisdiction in the CASA case was “based on federal question jurisdiction and suits against the United States. Neither head of jurisdiction is mentioned in Section 11, because neither existed until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. And none of the three heads of subject matter jurisdiction in Section 11 has any legal connection to CASA.”
So, under the Supreme Court’s logic “that jurisdictional statutes authorize equitable remedies, it should have looked to the state of remedies beginning in 1875, when the federal question jurisdiction statute was enacted, not 1789.”