Page:Washington v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (Order on Motion for Clarification, Apr. 13, 2023).pdf/4

 The Ninth Circuit expressed several concerns with overbroad injunctions:

First, “nationwide injunctive relief may be inappropriate where a regulatory challenge involves important or difficult questions of law, which might benefit from development in different factual contexts and in multiple decisions by the various courts of appeals.” L.A. Haven Hospice, Inc. v. Sebelius, 638 F.3d 644, 664 (9th Cir. 2011). The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that nationwide injunctions have detrimental consequences to the development of law and deprive appellate courts of a wider range of perspectives. See Califano, 442 U.S. at 702, 99 S.Ct. 2545 (highlighting that nationwide injunctions “have a detrimental effect by foreclosing adjudication by a number of different courts and judges”); United States v. Mendoza, 464 U.S. 154, 160, 104 S.Ct. 568, 78 L.Ed.2d 379 (1984) (concluding that allowing nonmutual collateral estoppel against the government would “substantially thwart the development of important questions of law by freezing the first final decision rendered on a particular legal issue” and “deprive [the Supreme] Court of the benefit it receives from permitting several courts of appeals to explore a difficult question before [the Supreme] Court grants certiorari”); Arizona v. Evans, 514 U.S. 1, 23 n.1, 115 S.Ct. 1185, 131 L.Ed.2d 34 (1995) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (“We have in many instances recognized that when frontier legal problems are presented, periods of ‘percolation’ in, and diverse opinions from, state and federal appellate courts may yield a better informed and more enduring final pronouncement by this Court”).

There are also the equities of non-parties who are deprived the right to litigate in other forums. See Zayn Siddique, Nationwide Injunctions, 117 COLUM. L. REV. 2095, 2125 (2017) (“A plaintiff may be correct that a particular agency action is unlawful or unduly burdensome, but remedying this harm with an overbroad injunction can cause serious harm to nonparties who had no opportunity to argue for more limited relief”). Short of intervening in a case, non-parties are essentially deprived of their ability to participate, and these collateral consequences are