Short answers, pulled from the story.
An injunction is a court order backed by the full coercive powers of the state, capable of sending a non-compliant party to prison. This legal mechanism compels a party to act or refrain from acting under the threat of criminal or civil penalties. Failure to comply with such an order can lead to imprisonment and charges of contempt of court.
Federal courts wielded injunctions as weapons to break strikes by unions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Following the United States government's successful use of an injunction to outlaw the Pullman boycott in 1894, employers discovered they could obtain federal court orders to ban strikes and organizing activities of all kinds. Labor and its allies persuaded the United States Congress in 1932 to pass the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which effectively prohibited federal courts from issuing injunctions in cases arising out of labor disputes.
In the United States, injunctions tend to come in three main forms: temporary restraining orders, preliminary injunctions, and permanent injunctions. A temporary restraining order is a special kind of injunction that may be issued before trial, sometimes without notice to the other party or a hearing. A preliminary injunction is given before trial, and a permanent injunction is issued after trial.
Super-injunctions are injunctions whose existence and details may not be legally reported, in addition to facts or allegations which may not be disclosed. Roy Greenslade credits the former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, with coining the word super-injunction in an article about the Trafigura affair in September 2009. An example was the super-injunction raised in September 2009 by Carter-Ruck solicitors on behalf of oil trader Trafigura, prohibiting the reporting of an internal Trafigura report into the 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump scandal.
The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have investigated patent holders in the United States for seeking preliminary injunctions against accused infringers of standard-essential patents. There is an ongoing debate among legal and economic scholars with major implications for antitrust policy in the United States as well as in other countries over the statutory limits to the patent holder's right to seek and obtain injunctive relief against infringers of standard-essential patents.
In 2025, the legal landscape of injunctions faced a new and controversial test when 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. This argument arose after the second Trump administration completed deportation flights despite a federal judge verbally ordering the flights to be returned to the United States. The case highlighted the tension between the traditional understanding of injunctions as written court orders and the practical realities of modern administrative enforcement.