High Court Injunction Ruling Slows Environmental Litigation (1)

The US Supreme Court’s recent decision curbing federal district courts’ ability to block policy enforcement nationwide threatens to make environmental litigation more tedious and time-intensive for those battling what they see as rapidly increasing climate hazards.

The 6-3 ruling last week in the case over President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship effectively prohibits judges from pausing executive policies or agency regulations on a broad scale.

While it leaves the window open for class actions to achieve temporary relief, that’s a steep hurdle in the environmental law space, where climate policies have varying real-world effects based on plaintiffs’ differing geological regions and ecosystems.

People who live near at-risk ecological zones or contest federal permits typically have the best standing to challenge federal rules or decisions in court, said Michael Gerrard, founder of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change.

But for nationwide directives like executive orders or Environmental Protection Agency regulations, “you’d have to say they’re close neighbors of a lot of different actions that are subject to the rule, so that’s going to be complicated,” he said. “It really does substantially slow things down if it has to be in the form of a class action.”

Amanda Berman, a partner at Crowell & Morning LLP who represents industry clients in climate and administrative law cases, said the environmental arena “is perhaps the area where the decision will have lesser impact,” as the typical types of relief sought in these cases are still on the table.

“It is important to keep in mind that the majority explicitly recognized that it does not bar a court from vacating an unlawful agency action—a relief that, by definition, has universal and nationwide impacts as it voids the challenged agency rule or other action across the board,” she said in an email.

Zach Pilchen, a senior counsel at Holland & Knight who recently left the EPA’s general counsel’s office, said environmental harms like greenhouse gas emissions or air pollution “often cannot be remedied selectively,” and the Supreme Court’s decision recognized broad injunctions can incidentally benefit others who aren’t a part of a lawsuit.

“In providing ‘complete relief’ to an individual or state litigant, a district court may incidentally benefit anyone else who is affected by the same widespread pollution,” Pilchen said in an email.

White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in an email that “any group continuing to argue in favor of this gross overreach must come to terms with the High Court’s decision.”

Water Impact

One area that stands to see the most immediate effects of the nationwide injunction ban concerns varying interpretations of what, exactly, the Clean Water Act protects.

The CWA regulates discharges into the “waters of the United States,” and the Trump administration said it plans to narrow the types of wetlands covered by the law to those directly next to navigable water—the latest in a back-and-forth history that has splintered the courts on the extent of federal authority to regulate the matter.

But assembling a viable environmental class action to challenge this eventual new rule will have to survive a current circuit split on where the “water” ends and a “wetland” begins, said John Cruden, a principal at Beveridge & Diamond PC and former assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Natural Resources Division.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit left jurisdiction to the states to regulate wetlands that don’t directly connect to rivers, streams, and coastlines. Other circuits, including the Fourth and Ninth, have yet to clarify their interpretations of “indistinguishable” flows between federal waterways and wetlands since the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA. The justices held in Sackett that “waters” covered by the CWA include only streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes, as well as adjacent wetlands that are “indistinguishable” from those waterways.

More conflicts like this are likely as “different courts reach different decisions when evaluating the same set of circumstances,” Cruden said.

How federal courts have treated different administrations’ definitions of federal waters under the CWA has resulted in a patchwork of rulings where “the law depends on where you live,” he said in a statement provided to Bloomberg Law.

In addition to hamstringing future actions, there are an handful of existing injunctions that the Supreme Court’s ruling puts at risk.

In May, the US District Court for the District of South Carolina ordered the government to unfreeze green grants across the country, and the suspension of $5 billion in electric vehicle infrastructure funds was blocked by the US District Court for the Western District of Washington in late June.

Cruden, who served in the Obama administration, said he “consistently argued against” the use of nationwide injunctions, as the judicial remedy was used to block notable environmental regulations, including those on hydraulic fracturing and an expanded water pollution rule.

Irreparable Delay

In her dissent, Justice Sonya Sotomayor criticized the majority for limiting relief from potentially unlawful orders to “cumbersome class-action litigation.”

Underscoring her criticism, environmentalists say the new standard will allow real-time harm as class actions drag on.

“Class actions provide a vehicle for pursuing broad relief, albeit at a much slower pace and at a much greater cost,” Earthjustice president Abigail Dillen said in a statement following the decision. “We are fully prepared to bring more of them.”

Just certifying a class can take months or even years, and a broad rule can greenlight developments with harmful environmental impacts that will be hard if not impossible to undo if the courts eventually agree that the move was illegal, Gerrard said.

“Damaging projects can be built, excessive pollution can be released into the air or the water,” he said. “Once the wetland is filled with cement, it’s gone. Once a stream is contaminated it may be a long time before the fish come back.”

The case is Trump v. Casa, Inc., 2025 BL 222886, U.S., No. 24A884, 6/27/25.