Federal courts are often asked to issue various forms of expedited relief, including stays pending appeal. This Article explores a little examined device that federal courts employ to freeze legal proceedings until they are able to rule on a party’s request for a stay pending appeal: the “administrative” or “temporary” stay. A decision whether to impose an administrative stay can have significant effects in the real world, as illustrated by recent high-profile litigation on topics including immigration and abortion. Yet federal courts have not endorsed a uniform standard for determining whether an administrative stay is warranted or clarified the basis for their power to issue such a stay. This Article draws attention to the administrative stay device and proposes standards to guide federal courts in determining when such a stay is appropriate. In so doing, the Article probes the bounds of federal courts’ equitable authority and the interests underlying their decisions about whether to grant interim relief in response to claims of impending harm.
The Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law filed this amicus brief on behalf of San Bernardino...
Who has the legal right to challenge decisions by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration? And should the moral umbrage of a group of anti-abortion...
President Joe Biden promised during his State of the Union address on March 7, 2024, that he would make the right to get an abortion a federal law.
“If...
Gradualism should have won out in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, exerting gravitational influence on the majority and dissenters alike. In general...
Today, legal culture is shaped by One Big Question: should courts, particularly the US Supreme Court, have a lot of power? This question is affecting...
On December 15, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued its decision in Illumina, Inc. v. FTC. Although the court vacated and...
On January 17, the Supreme Court heard arguments in what are potentially the most significant commercial law cases of the last decade. In the...
This Article introduces the Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores (JuDJIS), an expert-sourced measure of judicial traits that can locate nearly...
It is widely believed that President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments reflected a strategy of appeasing evangelical Christians and other religious...
Cyber stalking involves repeated, often relentless targeting of someone with abuse. Death and rape threats may be part of a perpetrator’s playbook...
We apply a dynamic influence model to the opinions of the U.S. federal courts to examine the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in influencing the...
Generative AI is already beginning to alter legal practice. If optimistic forecasts prove warranted, how might this technology transform judicial...
Professor Elizabeth Scott, the chief reporter of the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatement of Children and the Law, has often observed that the...
The idea of institutionalism figures prominently in today’s debates about the role of federal courts in American democracy. For example, Chief Justice...
Long lines inside Bodo’s Bagels, congestion on Emmet Street and a seemingly endless stream of runners and scooters zooming past your car in early...