Recalling Youngstown: Procedural Concerns & the Supreme Court’s Relationship with Executive Authority

Two cases from its recently concluded Term bring into stark relief the Supreme Court’s disrespect for both its own history and the authority of federal district courts to interpret and hold the executive accountable to the law. In Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. (2025) and Trump v. CASA (2025), the Court demonstrated enormous and troubling deference to the Trump administration in its efforts to unilaterally impose extreme and unprecedented immigration policies. In their dissents in these cases, Justices Sotomayor and Jackson made clear that the Court’s deference threatens to radically expand executive authority, weaken judicial independence, and curb fundamental constitutional rights to due process. In making their cases, both justices rely on Youngstown Sheet &Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), a nearly 75 year-old precedent that has long helped courts define the limits of executive power.

Youngstown is a 1952 case that arose when members of the United Steelworkers of America threatened a nationwide strike against steel manufacturers that would have disrupted steel production in the United States. President Harry S. Truman attempted to intervene to avoid the strike by directing the Secretary of State to take possession and “operate or arrange for the operation” of the nation’s steel mills to keep them open with Executive Order 10340. His rationale for the intervention was national security concerns regarding the United States’ efforts in the Korean War, to which the steel industry was vital in supplying materiel for the military. Truman relied solely on Article II’s executive powers in imposing the seizure, as no federal law could justify Truman’s actions, save an expansive reading of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which empowered the president to prevent strikes that affected national security but which was enacted over Truman’s veto. Truman, therefore, refused to invoke the Act as authority for the seizure, and Congress remained neutral, neither supporting Truman’s actions nor legislating against him.

Nearly all steel manufacturers sought relief in court to enjoin Truman’s order. Judge David Pine of the D.C. District Court ruled in favor of the steel manufacturers, in response to which the steelworkers initiated the nationwide strikes. On appeal, the D.C. Circuit Court decided en banc 5-4 to stay the district court’s decision, allowing the government to retain control of the mills and preventing the strike. The Supreme Court shortly thereafter accepted the petition and continued the stay. Twenty days after arguments were heard, the Court decided in a 6-3 opinion that President Truman’s executive order exceeded his authority under Article II and was therefore unconstitutional.

In his concurring opinion in Youngstown Justice Robert H. Jackson utilized both his experience dealing with executive power (Jackson had been appointed by Truman as Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, 1945-1946) and his understanding of constitutional principles as an associate justice of the Supreme Court to conclude that  “presidential powers are not fixed but fluctuate depending upon their disjunction or conjunction with those of Congress.” Justice Jackson outlined a metric for determining the constitutional boundaries of an executive action based on its legislative backing by Congress, ranging from a presidential act 1) with congressional authorization; 2) absent congressional approval or disapproval; and 3) in opposition to congressional will. Jackson writes that the President’s claim of authority is strongest under the first category, exists in a “zone of twilight” under the second category, and is at its weakest under the third category. Though Jackson’s was a concurring opinion, over the next decades, his analysis has become one of the most frequently cited in evaluating executive actions to determine their constitutionality.

Three quarters of a century after Youngstown, the Court is now rewriting the judiciary’s authority to review executive actions, authority that was quintessential in Youngstown. While the Supreme Court’s deference to executive authority has historically fluctuated as the nation faced various crises and conflicts, the Court’s recent obsequiousness has raised alarm bells for the liberal wing of the Court and Court observers.

In CASA, the Court proscribes lower court authority to restrain the executive branch’s actions in a decision that takes a formalist and procedural approach rather than addressing the underlying substantive issues, all the while disregarding landmark precedent. The Court’s majority opinion in CASA quashes district courts’ authority to issue universal injunctions against the federal government and opens the door for the executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born to certain categories of non-citizen parents to go into effect in all states not actively litigating against the order. As Professor Kate Shaw of Penn Carey Law writes, “its going into effect anywhere would create both practical and legal chaos [emphasis in original].”

Though brought to the Court through the emergency or “shadow” docket as an application for a partial stay, the Court scheduled oral arguments. However, the Court failed to take the opportunity to hear the argument on its merits: the Trump administration is trying to assert that children born to undocumented or lawful, temporarily present mothers in the U.S. should be denied citizenship unless the father is a citizen or green card holder. Rather than considering this substantive issue, the Court took a procedural approach in an originalist manner. The majority concluded that Congress did not intend to include universal injunctions when it authorized federal courts to issue equitable remedies under the Judiciary Act of 1789 because, as the majority asserts, universal injunctions are not “remedies ‘traditionally accorded by courts of equity’ at our country’s inception.” Through this rationale, lower courts do not have universal injunction authority against the federal government. The Court then asserts the principle of “complete relief” in this case by detailing that “prohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief: Her child will not be denied citizenship.” Essentially, if an injunction provides entitled relief to the plaintiffs in a case, a court may not issue a broader injunction to include individuals not party to the case. This is how the Court is asserting complete relief. However, this reading of “complete relief” fails to address the incomplete relief of the state plaintiffs who assert they will be harmed by the patchwork enforcement created without a universal injunction.

The larger issue, as the dissenters correctly and sharply point out, is the Court’s selective application of its own jurisprudence and complete unwillingness to engage with the actual argument on the merits. The majority’s rationale in CASA (along with its complete disregard of Youngstown) implicitly reinforced the same procedural-oriented decision-making process seen just four days earlier in DVD. In DVD—an emergency application brought by the government to stay a lower court’s injunction—the Court held in an unsigned order that the Department of Homeland Security could continue to process and issue third-country deportations without providing deportees with the chance to challenge the removal on the basis of possible inhumane treatment or other dangerous conditions. Though the majority did not provide an opinion explaining its rationale, the Court seemed focused on the procedural issues of the injunction rather than the substantive issues of individuals losing due process rights.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in DVD exposes this thought process, applying the due process analysis in Justice Robert H. Jackon’s concurrence in Youngstown to the present case: “The Due Process Clause represents ‘the principle that ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that we submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules.’ Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579, 646 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring).” The present Court overlooks this precedent; Justice Sotomayor correctly asserts that doing so erodes the fundamental value of due process that Youngstown laid out and signals the Court’s concerning choice to forego one of the most invaluable precedents on due process and executive authority.

Both Justices Sotomayor and Jackson refer to Robert H. Jackson’s Youngstown concurrence to emphasize its lasting impact on the judiciary’s relationship with determining and regulating executive authority. As Justice Jackson writes in her CASA dissent:

By duty and nature, federal courts say what the law is (if there is a genuine dispute), and require those who are subject to the law to conform their behavior to what the law requires. This is the essence of the rule of law. Do not take my word for it. Venerated figures in our Nation’s history have repeatedly emphasized that “[t]he essence of our free Government is ‘leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law’—to be governed by those impersonal forces which we call law.” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579, 654 (1952) (R. Jackson, J., concurring).

Youngstown, then, is a core case that should have guided the Court’s decision-making in DVD and CASA, yet the Court offered no written explanation in the former and Youngstown is wholly absent from the majority opinion in the latter.

From the way Justices Sotomayor and Jackson invoke Youngstown, it is clear they are sounding the jurisprudential alarm on the Court’s evolving interpretation of executive authority. In fact, comparing the practical and legal circumstances of CASA and Youngstown reveals the majority’s divergence from precedent. Should Youngstown have been handled and decided the way the Court did with CASA, a legal desert would have opened across the country. If the Court had not addressed the substantive issue of due process rights at the earliest stage and rather allowed the Truman administration to continue enforcing its executive order until the merits were adjudicated at some later date, irreparable injury would have occurred. Plaintiffs would have lost control of the mills and suffered significant economic injury that would not necessarily have been fully resolved once the Court answered the substantive claim. In CASA, a class of people will be denied citizenship and removed from the country before the Court answers the substantive claim. Though the Court claims the government will suffer irreparable harm, the real harm is happening to those subject to this executive order. The question of the district court’s authority to enjoin the executive never came before the court in Youngstown; the Court only considered the merits. CASA’s logic would have concerned the justices of the Vinson Court, based on that court’s consensus that it was compelled to consider the merits of Truman’s executive order.

The Court’s decision to permit the federal government to continue its course of action in DVD and CASA, while considering only procedural questions and ignoring the substantive issues, veers sharply from its own precedent in Youngstown and that case’s progeny. Justices Sotomayor and Jackson are absolutely correct to raise the alarm on the Court’s disregard for procedural due process, lower courts’ authority, and the need to curb excessive exercises of executive power. If anything, Youngstown in the historical context shows us that even in a time of active military engagement where deference to the executive may be more appropriate and necessary, the Court refused to bow to executive overstep, trusted district court decision-making, and served as a necessary check to ensure due process is preserved as the merits are thoroughly considered and debated. The current Court is failing to acknowledge this core precedent. It is failing to play its proper role in checks and balances, thereby bolstering executive power at the expense of its own authority. And most heartbreakingly, it is failing to protect the most vulnerable among us.

Equality and Liberty, Executive Order, Immigration