THE DEATH OF THE IRREPARABLE INJURY RULE

The irreparable injury rule has been a fixture of Anglo-American law for half a millennium. The rule states that equity will not act if a legal remedy would be "adequate." After surveying more than fourteen hundred cases, Professor Laycock concludes that this rule is dead - dead in the practical sense that it almost never affects the results of cases. In most cases, plaintiffs can get equitable relief if they want it, because legal remedies rarely satisfy the courts' stringent definition of "adequacy." When a court denies equitable relief, it does so for reasons apart from the irreparable injury rule - reasons derived from the interests of defendants or the legal system, and not from the adequacy of plaintiff's legal remedy. Professor Laycock identifies these underlying reasons for denying equitable relief and shows that they arise in discrete subsets of cases. He argues that they do not extend to all civil litigation, and they neither illustrate nor justify a general preference for legal remedies.