Injunction
An injunction is an equitable remedy in the form of a special court order compelling a party to do or refrain from doing certain acts. It was developed by the English courts of equity but its origins go back to Roman law and the equitable remedy of the "interdict".
"When a court employs the extraordinary remedy of injunction, it directs the conduct of a party, and does so with the backing of its full coercive powers." A party that fails to comply with an injunction faces criminal or civil penalties, including possible monetary sanctions and even imprisonment. They can also be charged with contempt of court.
Rationale
The injunction is an equitable remedy that was created by the English courts of equity. Like other equitable remedies, it has traditionally been given when a wrong cannot be effectively remedied by an award of money damages. Injunctions are intended to make whole again someone whose rights have been violated. Nevertheless, when deciding whether to grant an injunction, courts also take into account the interests of non-parties. When deciding whether to give an injunction, and deciding what its scope should be, courts give special attention to questions of fairness and good faith. One manifestation of this is that injunctions are subject to equitable defenses, such as laches and unclean hands.Injunctions are given in many different kinds of cases. They can prohibit future violations of the law, such as trespass to real property, infringement of a patent, or the violation of a constitutional right. Or they can require the defendant to repair past violations of the law.
An injunction can require someone to do something, like clean up an oil spill or remove a spite fence. Or it can prohibit someone from doing something, like using an illegally obtained trade secret. An injunction that requires conduct is called a "mandatory injunction." An injunction that prohibits conduct is called a "prohibitory injunction." Many injunctions are both—that is, they have both mandatory and prohibitory components, because they require some conduct and forbid other conduct.
When an injunction is given, it can be enforced with equitable enforcement mechanisms such as contempt. It can also be modified or dissolved if circumstances change in the future. These features of the injunction allow a court granting one to manage the behavior of the parties. That is the most important distinction between the injunction and another non-monetary remedy in American law, the declaratory judgment. Another way these two remedies are distinguished is that the declaratory judgment is sometimes available at an earlier point in a dispute than the injunction.
Worldwide
Australia
In the state of New South Wales, a court may grant an apprehended violence order to a person who fears violence, harassment, abuse, or stalking. The order prohibits the defendant from assaulting, harassing, threatening, stalking, or intimidating the person seeking the order. Other conditions may be included, such as a prohibition against contacting the person or attempting to find the person online. A court may issue the order if it believes a person has reasonable grounds for their fears or has no reasonable grounds for their fears. Non-compliance may result in the imposition of a fine, imprisonment, or both, and deportation.Turkey
s are a provisional form of injunctive relief, which can compel a party to do something or stop it from doing something.A plaintiff seeking an interim injunction must establish that he is likely to succeed on the merits, that he is likely to suffer severe harm in the absence of preliminary relief, and that an injunction is in the public interest.
In Turkish law, interim injunction is an extraordinary remedy that is never awarded as of right. In each case, courts balance the competing claims of injury and consider the likely hardship on the defendant.
United States
History
Injunctions have been especially important at two moments in American history.First, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, federal courts used injunctions to break strikes by unions. For example, after the United States government successfully used an injunction to outlaw the Pullman boycott in 1894 in In re Debs, employers found that they could obtain federal court injunctions to ban strikes and organizing activities of all kinds by unions. These injunctions were often extremely broad; one injunction issued by a federal court in the 1920s effectively barred the United Mine Workers of America from talking to workers who had signed yellow dog contracts with their employers. Unable to limit what they called "government by injunction" in the courts, labor and its allies persuaded the United States Congress in 1932 to pass the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which imposed so many procedural and substantive limits on the federal courts' power to issue injunctions that it effectively prohibited federal court from issuing injunctions in cases arising out of labor disputes. A number of states followed suit and enacted "Little Norris-LaGuardia Acts" that imposed similar limitations on state courts' powers. The courts have since recognized a limited exception to the Norris-LaGuardia Act's strict limitations in those cases in which a party seeks injunctive relief to enforce the grievance arbitration provisions of a collective bargaining agreement.
Second, injunctions were crucial to the second half of the twentieth century in the desegregation of American schools. Federal courts gave injunctions that carried out the command of Brown v Board of Education to integrate public schools in the United States, and at times courts took over the management of public schools in order to ensure compliance.
Injunctions remain widely used to require government officials to comply with the Constitution, and they are also frequently used in private law disputes about intellectual property, real property, and contracts. Many state and federal statutes, including environmental statutes, civil rights statutes and employment-discrimination statutes, are enforced with injunctions.
In Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo, S.A. v. Alliance Bond Fund, Inc., the Supreme Court stated that the scope of federal injunctive relief is constrained by the limits on equitable remedies that existed in the English Court of Chancery around 1789.
In 2025, United States Attorney General Pam Bondi and other Justice Department officials argued in a court filing that "an oral directive is not enforceable as an injunction", after the second Trump administration completed deportation flights despite a federal judge verbally ordering the flights to be returned to the United States.
Forms
Injunctions in the United States tend to come in three main forms: temporary restraining orders, preliminary injunctions and permanent injunctions. For both temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions, the goal is usually to preserve the status quo until the court is able to decide the case.Temporary restraining orders
A special kind of injunction that may be issued before trial is called a "temporary restraining order". A TRO may be issued without notice to the other party or a hearing. A TRO will be given only for a short period of time before a court can schedule a hearing at which the restrained person may appear and contest the order. If the TRO is contested, the court must decide whether to issue a preliminary injunction. Temporary restraining orders are often, but not exclusively, given to prevent domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, or harassment.Preliminary injunctions
Preliminary injunctions are given before trial. Because they are issued at an early stage, before the court has heard the evidence and made a decision in the case, they are more rarely given. The requirements for a preliminary injunction tend to be the same as for a permanent injunction, with the additional requirement that the party asking for the injunction is likely to succeed on the merits.Permanent injunctions
Permanent injunctions are issued after trial. Different federal and state courts sometimes have slightly different requirements for obtaining a permanent injunction. The Supreme Court enumerated the traditional four-factor test in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C. as:- the plaintiff has suffered irreparable injury;
- remedies available at law are inadequate to compensate that injury;
- considering the balance of hardships between the plaintiff and defendant, a remedy in equity is warranted; and
- the public interest would not be disserved by an injunction.