September 9, 2025
One month after the U.S. Supreme Court hindered judges’ power to universally pause federal policies, hundreds of public interest lawyers took a crash course on using class actions to sue the president.
The June decision in Trump v. CASA had found courts could only grant relief to named parties in a case, but suggested that policies could still be paused on a nationwide basis through class action litigation — a procedurally complex process by which representative plaintiffs can sue on behalf of all similarly situated people.
And so in July, the advocacy group Democracy 2025 held a training for its coalition of more than 500 organizations that call themselves the “united legal frontline” in challenging President Donald Trump’s controversial policies in court.
Joe Sellers of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC — who has worked as a class action litigator for four decades and sits on the Judicial Conference of the United States’ Advisory Committee on Civil Rules — led a webinar on Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which governs the class action process.
Sellers says he prepared an hourlong program on class actions after he was told that many policy litigators “know a lot about a lot of areas, but they’re not very familiar with this [type of litigation].” He explained to them the requirements of Rule 23’s various subsections, what the CASA decision did and did not decide, and how to avoid the yearslong delay typical of the class approval process.
“Here, where you’re challenging a discrete governmental action that has an imminent effect on a group of people … the pursuit of class claims can be framed in a way that is very lean,” he told Law360. “You convey to the court an interest in moving as quickly as possible to get a class certified, along with the relief that you’re seeking.”
Class actions involving public policy are nothing new. They hearken to the modern origins of Rule 23 — revisions made in 1966 with the Civil Rights Movement in mind. And even before the CASA opinion altered the litigation landscape, class actions played a growing role in lawsuits seeking to stop Trump’s policies. But now that the high court has pointed to class actions as a vehicle for such claims, the administration might seek new ways to block class certification.
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Class actions do seem like the simplest way to replicate the relief provided by universal injunctions, Sellers said, and “on the face of it, this doesn’t sound like a major change. But class action litigation is itself very significant, protracted and expensive,” he said. “It potentially interposes an initial step in the process of obtaining relief.”
Certification, which is often required to pause federal policies, often takes time and requires discovery. But not always.
Read Class Actions May Be the New Injunction Bid, And Next Target.