What Is an Injunction? A Court Order to Do Something or Stop

An injunction is a court order directing a party to do a specified thing or to stop doing one, backed by the court's power to punish disobedience as contempt, which can mean fines, seizure of assets or imprisonment. That enforcement is what distinguishes it, since an order to pay money is enforced by taking the money while an order to stop is enforced against the person. It is granted where damages would be an inadequate remedy, which covers situations where the harm cannot be measured in money, where it would be irreversible, or where the wrong is continuing and compensating for it repeatedly would be absurd. Because it constrains behaviour directly rather than requiring payment afterwards, courts treat it as a serious step and apply tests before granting one.

Several forms serve different situations:

• •Prohibitory, ordering a party to stop doing something, which is the commonest form
• •Mandatory, ordering a party to take positive action, which courts grant more reluctantly since supervising compliance is harder
• •Interim or interlocutory, granted before a case is decided to preserve the position until trial
• •Final, granted as part of the judgment after the merits have been determined
• •Without notice, granted in urgent cases where warning the other side would defeat the purpose, and subject to strict duties of disclosure
• •Freezing orders, preventing assets being moved or dissipated pending a claim

Interim orders present a particular difficulty, since the court is being asked to restrict someone's conduct before deciding whether they have done anything wrong. The standard approach asks whether there is a serious question to be tried rather than deciding the merits, then whether damages would adequately compensate the applicant if the order is refused and they later win, then whether damages would adequately compensate the respondent if it is granted and they later win, and finally where the balance of convenience lies. Applicants are usually required to undertake to compensate the other side for losses caused by the order if the case ultimately fails, which is a significant deterrent to speculative applications and which makes such orders effectively unavailable to parties who could not meet that undertaking.

The enforcement mechanism deserves separate attention because it works differently from the rest of civil law. Breaching an injunction is contempt of court, which is a distinct wrong against the administration of justice rather than against the other party, and it is punishable by fine, by seizure of assets and by imprisonment, which makes it one of the few routes by which a civil proceeding leads to a custodial sentence. The order binds the person it names and also, in many systems, anyone who knows of it and deliberately frustrates it, which is how orders bind people who were never parties. Proceedings for contempt require the order to have been clear, to have been properly served and to have been breached knowingly, and courts scrutinise those requirements carefully precisely because liberty may be at stake in a case that began as a private dispute.

The remedy sits at several sensitive points. Orders restraining publication engage freedom of expression directly, and jurisdictions differ sharply over whether a court may stop something being published rather than compensating afterwards, with prior restraint disfavoured in some systems and available in others. Orders whose existence cannot be reported create a further difficulty that has attracted substantial criticism and parliamentary attention in the United Kingdom. Orders against protest and industrial action raise the question of whether a civil remedy is being used to control political activity. Orders against unnamed persons, used against protesters and trespassers, extend the remedy to people who were never before the court. And the speed of interim proceedings means consequential restrictions are imposed on limited evidence, sometimes within hours, which is exactly what makes them useful and exactly what makes them risky.

An order to act or refrain, enforced against the person by contempt powers, granted where money would not repair the harm. Interim orders restrict conduct before any finding of wrongdoing, so the test asks about serious questions, adequacy of damages both ways and the balance of convenience, with an undertaking to compensate if the case fails. Orders restraining publication engage expression directly.