INTRODCUTION
Historically, the irreparable injury rule has policed the jurisdictional boundary between law and equity. This rule, formulated as the doctrine that equity will not intervene where the legal remedies are adequate, is routinely maligned by scholars and famously eulogized by Professor Laycock, but courts continue to recite it. This Article suggests that the rule, although perhaps in critical condition, is at least, in the words of Miracle Max, ‘slightly alive’ as a means of protecting the right of defendants to a jury trial in agency enforcement actions, particularly with respect to claims for restitution or disgorgement. The civil jury trial, according to Blackstone, was ‘the glory of the English law’, and juries were ‘the best investigators of truth, and the surest guardians of public justice;. Many of the founders viewed the civil jury as a ‘valuable safeguard to liberty’, if not ‘the very palladium of free government’ …
Layne Keele, Only Mostly Dead: How the Irreparable Injury Rule Can Protect the Jury Trial Right for Claims in Restitution, 77 Oklahoma Law Review 569 (2025).
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