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. The complaint alleged violations of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and Florida’s RICO Act, targeting the organizations’ policy statements and legal filings supporting access to gender-affirming care for minors. Uthmeier sought declaratory and injunctive relief, statutory penalties of $1 million per defendant, and extraordinary remedies including dissolution of the organizations and forfeiture of their charters. On the day he filed, Uthmeier announced the lawsuit on X, stating his office had sued the defendants for “mutilating kids and misleading families,” and later said publicly that he wanted to “hurt” the organizations “in their wallet” and that the lawsuit would “end” gender-affirming care “for once and for all.”
Despite the public fanfare, Uthmeier did not serve any of the defendants for more than three months. AAP — an Illinois nonprofit incorporated and headquartered in Chicago — then filed suit in the Northern District of Illinois under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging the Florida enforcement action was brought in bad faith to retaliate against AAP’s First Amendment-protected advocacy. Shortly after AAP filed its federal suit, Uthmeier finally served process on AAP in Illinois and filed an amended state complaint adding an antitrust claim.
The district court (Judge Kennelly) denied Uthmeier’s motion to dismiss, found personal jurisdiction and venue proper in Illinois, and granted AAP a preliminary injunction barring Uthmeier from pursuing the Florida enforcement action against AAP. Uthmeier appealed and moved the Seventh Circuit to stay the preliminary injunction pending expedited consideration of his appeal.
The Court’s Holding
The Seventh Circuit, per curiam, denied Uthmeier’s motion for a stay pending appeal. The court emphasized that a stay requires a “strong showing” of likely success on the merits and irreparable harm, neither of which Uthmeier demonstrated. On personal jurisdiction, the court found that Uthmeier’s conduct — including seeking to dissolve AAP and forfeit its Illinois charter, and targeting a nationwide “relevant market” — showed he intended to crush AAP’s operations in Illinois, satisfying the Calder “express aiming” test as applied by the Fifth Circuit in Defense Distributed v. Grewal and the D.C. Circuit in Media Matters for America v. Paxton. On venue, the court held that the chilling effects on AAP, its Illinois-based publications, and the conduct underlying the state claims all occurred in the Northern District of Illinois, making venue proper.
On the critical Younger abstention question, the court held that Uthmeier failed to show a strong likelihood that the district court erred in applying the bad-faith exception. Younger abstention does not apply where a state proceeding is brought in bad faith or to harass. The court rejected Uthmeier’s argument that the bad-faith exception requires a pattern of repeated prosecutions, noting that Younger itself framed the exception in the disjunctive — bad faith or repetition — and that multiple circuits have held a single bad-faith prosecution suffices. The court further held that consideration of the underlying merits is appropriate in the bad-faith analysis, and found the Florida claims facially weak because AAP is a nonprofit that neither sells nor provides gender-affirming care, undermining the commercial-activity element required by all three state claims.
The court noted strong support from the Fifth Circuit’s Defense Distributed decision and the D.C. Circuit’s Media Matters decision — both of which affirmed federal injunctions against out-of-state attorneys general pursuing allegedly retaliatory enforcement actions — and observed that Uthmeier failed to engage with either precedent. The court also found no irreparable harm to Uthmeier from an expedited stay of his state case while the appeal proceeded.
Key Takeaways
- The Younger abstention bad-faith exception does not require a pattern of repeated prosecutions; a single enforcement action brought without a reasonable expectation of success and for retaliatory purposes can qualify.
- An out-of-state attorney general who seeks to dissolve a forum-state organization, forfeit its charter, and halt its nationwide activities may be subject to personal jurisdiction in that organization’s home state under the Calder “express aiming” doctrine.
- Federal courts may properly consider the weakness of the underlying state claims as circumstantial evidence of bad faith in the Younger analysis, even at the preliminary injunction stage.
- A nonprofit scientific organization’s policy statements, amicus briefs, and agency comments on matters of public health constitute First Amendment-protected advocacy, not commercial speech triggering consumer-protection or RICO liability, at least on the record presented here.
- The Fifth Circuit’s Defense Distributed (2020) and D.C. Circuit’s Media Matters (2025) decisions provide a cross-circuit framework for enjoining retaliatory enforcement actions by state attorneys general against out-of-state advocacy organizations.
Why It Matters
This decision is the latest in a growing line of federal cases grappling with the use of state enforcement power against advocacy organizations whose speech a state official disfavors. The Seventh Circuit’s refusal to stay the injunction signals that federal courts — applying Younger’s own bad-faith carve-out — will scrutinize enforcement actions that appear designed to punish protected advocacy rather than vindicate legitimate state interests. The court’s willingness to assert personal jurisdiction over a Florida official based on the intended Illinois effects of his enforcement strategy has significant implications for any attorney general who pursues litigation explicitly aimed at dissolving or nationally silencing an out-of-state organization.
The opinion also reinforces the First Amendment’s role as a shield against government-initiated litigation used as a weapon. By finding that AAP’s right not to be subjected to a bad-faith prosecution could not be vindicated merely by raising a First Amendment defense in Florida state court, the court preserved the federal forum as a practical remedy. The case now proceeds to full merits consideration of the preliminary injunction on an expedited basis, and its outcome could set binding precedent on the intersection of Younger abstention, attorney general enforcement power, and the First Amendment rights of nonprofit scientific organizations.