The recent Trump case was one of the most eye-opening and confusing judgments I've read. For context, Trump signed an executive order to re-interpret "birthright" citizenship limiting it to children born in USA by at least one parent with US citizenship. A couple district courts ordered preliminary injunctions against its enforcement. The government eventually argued to the Supreme Court that the preliminary injunctions were too broad in scope. The court with an apparently 6:3 majority decided that the lower courts had no right to award "universal injunctions" beyond the scope of the plaintiffs seeking the injunction. Federal courts' power to issue injunctions apparently stems from the Judiciary Act of 1789, which endowed federal courts with jurisdiction over "all suits... in equity". This is nothing exciting, except that the USSC then declares that the scope of "equity" is basically the jurisdiction of the High Court of Chancery in Engla...
What happens when two different pieces of legislation contradict each other? In common law, one could apply the principle of "implied repeal", where the subsequent legislation would be considered to have repealed the earlier one. But the Basic Law has not undergone amendments since its promulgation in 1990, so this does not apply. Another common way to resolve apparent contradictions is to consider that the more general provision be qualified by the more specific one. Yet in cases where fundamental rights are at issue, courts may instead adopt a " generous interpretation ", restricting the scope of those provisions that appear to restrict fundamental rights. Indeed, this was the approach laid out by the Court of Final Appeal in 1999 in Ng Ka Ling : The courts should give a generous interpretation to the provisions in Chapter III that contain these constitutional guarantees in order to give to Hong Kong residents the full measure of fundamental rights and freedoms so...
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