Injunctions Professor Smith's Remedies Tutorial Injunction - Basic Definition Injunctions are orders of the court telling a party to a lawsuit to do or not to do a certain thing. Injunctive relief should be no more burdensome to the defendants than necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs. Madsen v. Women's Health Ctr. Injunctions may be permanent, which means they have been granted after a full-blown trial on the merits. TROs may be granted without a hearing or notice provided there is some exigent circumstance or necessity.
Prohibitive injunctions command a party to refrain from doing something.
Mandatory injunctions command a party to affirmatively do something. An injunction which has been issued by a court of equity and properly served must be obeyed no matter how erroneous the court was in issuing it. Until that decision is reversed by an appellate court, the injunction must be respected and violation of the order may be punished as contempt. When they indicated their intention to march anyway, Birmingham obtained an injunction from a state court which ordered them to refrain from demonstrating. Marchers who defied the order, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were arrested.