Background
In December 2025, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed suit in Florida state court against the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), and the Endocrine Society. His complaint alleged that the organizations violated Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, Florida’s RICO Act, and (in a later amendment) Florida antitrust law, by publishing policy statements and filing amicus briefs supporting access to gender-affirming care for minors. Uthmeier sought monetary penalties of up to $1 million per defendant, dissolution of the organizations, and forfeiture of their charters. He did not serve process on the defendants for more than three months after filing, and simultaneously made public statements that he intended to “hurt” the organizations financially and “end” gender-affirming care “for once and for all.”
AAP — an Illinois nonprofit headquartered in Itasca, Illinois — then sued Uthmeier in the Northern District of Illinois under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that the Florida enforcement action was a bad-faith, retaliatory prosecution designed to punish and chill AAP’s constitutionally protected advocacy, in violation of the First Amendment. The district court (Judge Kennelly) granted AAP’s motion for a preliminary injunction, enjoining Uthmeier from pursuing the Florida state court action against AAP. Uthmeier appealed and moved for a stay of the injunction pending the Seventh Circuit’s expedited review.
The Seventh Circuit’s decision addresses only the narrow question of whether to stay the preliminary injunction — not its ultimate merits. The panel (Judges Hamilton, Scudder, and Jackson-Akiwumi) denied the stay, with a dissent noted but not reproduced in the published decision.
The Court’s Holding
The court held that Uthmeier failed to make the “strong showings” required to obtain a stay pending appeal under Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418 (2009): that he was likely to succeed on the merits of his appeal and that he would suffer irreparable harm absent a stay. On personal jurisdiction, the court found that Uthmeier’s conduct — seeking to dissolve AAP’s Illinois charter, impose nationwide restrictions on its activities, and chill its speech — was expressly aimed at causing injury in Illinois, satisfying the Calder v. Jones effects test. The court relied heavily on analogous decisions by the Fifth Circuit in Defense Distributed v. Grewal, 971 F.3d 485 (5th Cir. 2020), and the D.C. Circuit in Media Matters for America v. Paxton, 138 F.4th 563 (D.C. Cir. 2025), both of which upheld personal jurisdiction over out-of-state attorneys general in nearly identical circumstances. On venue, the court found that the chilling effects on AAP in the Northern District of Illinois, along with the fact that the conduct underlying the Florida claims — AAP’s publications and advocacy decisions — originated there, provided sufficient basis for venue.
On the critical Younger abstention question, the court emphasized that Younger v. Harris has always included an exception for proceedings brought in bad faith, and that the exception is not limited to cases involving repeated or serial prosecutions. The district court’s detailed factual findings supported an inference of bad faith: all three Florida state-law claims require proof that AAP engaged in commercial activity, yet AAP is a nonprofit scientific organization that neither sells nor provides gender-affirming care; the Florida complaint mischaracterized AAP’s own policy statement (which explicitly acknowledged risks and limitations of care); Uthmeier delayed prosecution for months; and his public statements made plain an intent to suppress AAP’s speech rather than vindicate legitimate legal interests. The court also rejected Uthmeier’s argument that the district court erred in assessing the underlying merits of the Florida claims as part of the bad-faith inquiry, holding that such consideration is invited — and likely required — by the objective framing of the bad-faith standard established in Kugler v. Helfant, 421 U.S. 117 (1975).
The court further found that AAP could not obtain an adequate remedy by raising a First Amendment defense within the Florida proceeding itself, because the constitutional right at stake was the right not to be subjected to a bad-faith prosecution in the first place — a right that cannot be vindicated by undergoing the prosecution.
Key Takeaways
- A state attorney general who files suit seeking to dissolve an out-of-state organization’s charter and halt its nationwide operations may be subject to personal jurisdiction in that organization’s home state, even without traditional physical contacts with the forum.
- The Younger abstention doctrine’s bad-faith exception does not require a pattern of repeated or multiple prosecutions — a single enforcement action can qualify if supported by specific factual findings of retaliatory intent or objective hopelessness on the merits.
- Federal courts may consider the weakness of the underlying state-law claims as part of the bad-faith inquiry; a state action that appears facially inapplicable to a nonprofit scientific advocacy organization supports an inference that the prosecution was filed without a reasonable expectation of success.
- The Fifth Circuit’s Defense Distributed v. Grewal and the D.C. Circuit’s Media Matters v. Paxton decisions provide strong circuit-court support for enjoining out-of-state attorneys general who bring retaliatory enforcement actions targeting First Amendment–protected advocacy.
Why It Matters
This decision is a significant check on the use of state enforcement power to silence disfavored scientific or policy advocacy. By affirming — at least at the stay stage — that a nonproft medical organization’s peer-reviewed publications, amicus briefs, and regulatory comments are protected First Amendment activity that cannot be weaponized into RICO or consumer-fraud predicates without a realistic commercial nexus, the Seventh Circuit signals that bad-faith exception to Younger is a meaningful safeguard and not a theoretical one. The court’s willingness to exercise jurisdiction over a sitting state attorney general based on the extraterritorial effects of his enforcement strategy may also deter similar cross-border enforcement actions targeting advocacy organizations headquartered outside the prosecuting state.
The case will proceed on an expedited basis to full merits review of the preliminary injunction. If the injunction is ultimately affirmed, it would establish that federal courts can and will block state enforcement actions targeting medical and scientific advocacy organizations when the record supports a finding of prosecutorial bad faith — a holding with implications well beyond the gender-affirming care context.