4 ms·

Lawyer here: As a general rule, you can't bind non-parties with injunctions. Courts have no authority to enforce such injunctions either. A very recent example

Lawyer here: As a general rule, you can't bind non-parties with injunctions. Courts have no authority to enforce such injunctions either. A very recent example: https://reason.com/volokh/2025/01/24/google-as-non-party-not-subject-to-injunction-that-expressly-ordered-it-to-take-down-youtube-posts/ https://reason.com/volokh/2025/01/24/google-as-non-party-not...

masfuerte 2y ago
Idiot here. So the court can't ban Apple from doing business with Google but they can ban Google from doing business with Apple?
- DannyBee 2y ago
  Generally no, actually. Not without apple being a party. Now, over the past few decades this has been slowly relaxed in practice (IE courts willing to try to do it), but the underlying precedent has not actually changed on this. Hence my comment elsewhere that the supreme court has been looking for a case in which to reassert this precedent (They have). Where it starts to get weird is when you ask the more generic variations of this question: Can a court ban Google from doing business with companies with market cap more than 1 trillion? Can a court order Google to have an independent master approve any contracts it enters into? etc Generally the remedies are limited by applicable law, and in turn by congress's authority in the first place (in the case of federal lawsuits like this). Trying to enjoin apple when they are a non-party runs into the latter more than the former. Trying to say who Google can contract with runs more into the former than the latter. Keep in mind civil remedies are also much less expansive than criminal ones because of constitutional limitations. Unfortunately, for any mildly novel remedy, it's hard to predict what will happen - they are just uncommon enough that without running it through appeals/etc, you just don't know what will happen. It's total guesswork in practice. Even things that were once considered not novel have changed - for a long time, the FTC sought money damages in antitrust cases and unfair competition cases, but that was ruled "not okay" 5 years ago. Whatever one may think of the court, this was actually quite right, as the statute goes - they were abusing a statutory provision that granted them the ability to get injunctions to basically "enjoin" companies into paying them fines. This was clearly ridiculous. But it went on quite a while.

masfuerte 2y ago

Idiot here. So the court can't ban Apple from doing business with Google but they can ban Google from doing business with Apple?

DannyBee 2y ago
Generally no, actually. Not without apple being a party. Now, over the past few decades this has been slowly relaxed in practice (IE courts willing to try to do it), but the underlying precedent has not actually changed on this. Hence my comment elsewhere that the supreme court has been looking for a case in which to reassert this precedent (They have). Where it starts to get weird is when you ask the more generic variations of this question: Can a court ban Google from doing business with companies with market cap more than 1 trillion? Can a court order Google to have an independent master approve any contracts it enters into? etc Generally the remedies are limited by applicable law, and in turn by congress's authority in the first place (in the case of federal lawsuits like this). Trying to enjoin apple when they are a non-party runs into the latter more than the former. Trying to say who Google can contract with runs more into the former than the latter. Keep in mind civil remedies are also much less expansive than criminal ones because of constitutional limitations. Unfortunately, for any mildly novel remedy, it's hard to predict what will happen - they are just uncommon enough that without running it through appeals/etc, you just don't know what will happen. It's total guesswork in practice. Even things that were once considered not novel have changed - for a long time, the FTC sought money damages in antitrust cases and unfair competition cases, but that was ruled "not okay" 5 years ago. Whatever one may think of the court, this was actually quite right, as the statute goes - they were abusing a statutory provision that granted them the ability to get injunctions to basically "enjoin" companies into paying them fines. This was clearly ridiculous. But it went on quite a while.