Thank you. For my purpose as a reader it is editorial incompetence that the article neither provided that link, nor the name of the case to make it easy to lookup.
It's really painful when you've got coverage of state court cases where you have neither the case name nor the court it was filed in nor the docket nor any document nor anything that would let you figure any of this out.
This is my gripe with regular news. Science paper? No link. New law bill? No link. Someone made an hour-long speech? 30 second cut, no link to the full speech. Is it almost as if they'd rather we didn't see their sources?
A more cynical take is that it isn't editorial incompetence, it's an editorial decision. Once you notice it, it's hard not to notice how often you aren't given the sources or ways to further confirm stories, especially those that might be controversial.
I find the Supreme court decisions to be fascinating reads and overall much more interesting and complicated than most news services make them out to be.
Lol, they're also quite ideological. Don't fall for the trap that these people are enlightened philosophers. They have a lot of flaws in their own right.
Ask good lawyers about their thoughts on SCOTUS Justices, it's not always peachy.
Even if they are ideological, they are not usually political hacks (cough Thomas cough).
Honestly though, for as much flak as this current court gets, there is at least a certain consistency where they at least mostly stick to arguments about the letter of the law. In previous courts you would see some truly wild written arguments about how, like, a specific word in the Commerce Clause or whatever could mean whatever you wanted it to.
Haha. Sure. Like when they make up Qualified Immunity which is a completely made up special status/protection given by the Courts, not by law or common law but abusing the concept of Judicial immunity and expanding it to all governmental officials.
My bad. I can no longer edit/delete my comment to fix it.
I haven't responded that way in the past but was responded to that way a couple of days ago and guess it took hold. I can see why you have to clamp down on it, it easily spreads.
Most of the current legitimacy damage stems from a perception that the Court has members that are arbitrating law over bribery while simultaneously engaging in behavior that looks suspiciously coercive. I think that's a major issue, but it's a bit orthogonal to the question of whether they use sound judgment to arrive at rulings like, say, US v. Rahimi 22-915.
(The other source, to my eyes, of questions of legitimacy is that the appointment of three judges in a narrow amount of time under one party's dominance of Congress and the Presidency has fundamentally shifted the "flavor" of the way the Court interprets law. Rather than bringing their legitimacy into question, that's rather the point of the process by which the US appoints Justices and the length of their term; the Court's "personality" is stable over long stretches of time, but it can shift and it does go through eras. People complaining about the new era don't seem to realize that for many Americans, the previous era was strange times that called to question in their minds the legitimacy of the Court).
And honestly, while we like to lump them into "conservative" and "liberal" camps for simplicity, it's easy to get the correlation wrong. Like anyone else, their moral and legal philosophies might make them lean one way or another politically, not the other way around. Even for the most extremely political justices, to hear them expound on the legal principles of federalism or human rights is very fascinating.
It's easy to forget that, while they are political appointees, they have to have fairly long careers as acting judges to even qualify for the appointments.
Save for at least one current sitting Justice: Amy Coney Barrett. They only had ~3 years of experience being a judge, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (2017–2020), before being nominated to the Supreme Court. Yes, they have experience in other law related roles, however your comment explicitly stated, "...fairly long careers as acting judges...," so that is what I'm speaking to.
> It's easy to forget that, while they are political appointees, they have to have fairly long careers as acting judges to even qualify for the appointments.
This is objectively false. There are no requirements like this and there have been many appointees throughout history without many, if any, qualifications for the role.
Liberal vs. conservative has always been the wrong take. The stronger dividing line is textualism vs pragmatism.
In fact Scalia famously said this coming from a textualist perspective which I think most people can agree with even if they hate him: “ If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach.”
This seems absolutely correct, but when is the last time ypu ever saw a commentator observe this? Critique has been reduced to “i dont like the effect so the interpretation of the law is wrong.” Put the other way, a fair observer must eventually say “i really hate the conclusion but they got it right.”
>The stronger dividing line is textualism vs pragmatism.
They should be doing what is right for the American people. There are clearly laws on the books today which infringe on individual freedoms (abortion), harm society as a whole (citizens united), etc.
The 'justice system' is supposed to be the government branch protecting the little guy from powerful elites. I've not often seen that. I see the opposite. If the legal system won't deliver justice, well, people are going to take things into their own hands whether that's 'justice' or not. If you bury your child, and you see the people ultimately responsible get away with it, I'm not sure I could really blame them.
Strong but respectful disagree from me. Justice is supposed to be blind. And if right and wrong were so clear cut there would no need for democracy at all.
The court is not a democratic institution and exists to uphold the textual rule of law as determined by lawmakers. If a pragmatic ruling by the court can circumvent a politically logjammed congress, so be it. But the courts deciding what is right or wrong for the American people is a very slippery slope that leads to disaster. And a court that just rules against the (existing) elite every time is a junta.
Both sides have their merit, but some people want to have it both ways - do you want pragmatic judges or more democracy? They can often be mutually exclusive.
> The stronger dividing line is textualism vs pragmatism.
Except when it came to "textualism vs pragmatism", I've seen that the "textualist" judges have, in many cases, no problem being "pragmatists" when it suits their desired outcome on an issue.
For example, when Scalia dissented in some famous gay rights cases (I'm thinking of Lawrence v Texas specifically) his basic disgust at the thought of same sex relations was laid bare. Ironically, in Lawrence v Texas his dissent was basically correct - striking down laws against sodomy was a step towards gay marriage - but the gist of his argument was that gay marriage was such a god awful, horrible, unthinkable thing that any decision that allowed it must be prima facie wrong. He was basically warning "This decision will force us to allow gay marriage" as if, instead of that being a good thing, it was akin to allowing the apocalypse.
Scalia also authored the 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, a major second amendment case that held, for the first time, that individuals had a private right to own guns (not just "a well-regulated militia"). Read up on that case, as tons of "conservative" judicial scholars argued that it was "pulled from thin air" just as much as Roe v Wade was. From the Wikipedia page:
> Richard Posner, judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, compares Heller to Roe v. Wade, stating that it created a federal constitutional right that did not previously exist, and he asserts that the originalist method – to which Justice Antonin Scalia claimed to adhere – would have yielded the opposite result of the majority opinion.
>> The text of the amendment, whether viewed alone or in light of the concerns that actuated its adoption, creates no right to the private possession of guns for hunting or other sport, or for the defense of person or property. It is doubtful that the amendment could even be thought to require that members of state militias be allowed to keep weapons in their homes, since that would reduce the militias' effectiveness. Suppose part of a state's militia was engaged in combat and needed additional weaponry. Would the militia's commander have to collect the weapons from the homes of militiamen who had not been mobilized, as opposed to obtaining them from a storage facility? Since the purpose of the Second Amendment, judging from its language and background, was to assure the effectiveness of state militias, an interpretation that undermined their effectiveness by preventing states from making efficient arrangements for the storage and distribution of military weapons would not make sense.
Pretty much. He also authored an opinion today against the EPA's good neighbor rule. Directly continuing the work of his mother, who was head of the EPA during the early Reagan years until she was forced to resign as even within that administration she was flagrantly unwilling to do her job of enforcing regs to prevent pollution while also illegally utilizing the power of the office for personal politics.
Always strikes me as weird that the clear through line from her time in power to his own jurisprudence on environmental issues doesn't come up more.
I totally agree. I have also been captivated by the oral arguments. To the extent that I find myself pre-researching some of the cases' background beforehand. Makes for compelling entertainment when you have a sense on why the justices approach questioning the way that they do. Beats any podcast I know.
They're also eminently readable, which (to me) shows the massive skill of whoever writes these. The fact that I, a layman, can easily understand them speaks to the quality of the writing.
Or to how unexceptionally average most of the judges actually are.
If you're willing to entertain these are skilled brilliant jurists with some kind of mystical levels of elucidation, maybe they're actually just people who failed upward into a job with a fancy robe
The difficulty of understanding a text isn't proportional to how skilled the person is at their job (I think it's inversely proportional, if anything), but to how familiar a field is.
It doesn't take a good developer to describe a system in a way that nobody can understand it. It does take a great one to describe a system in a way that a layman can understand it.
If you've been around the valley long enough to hear pitches, you've surely met some remarkable bullshitters who can convincingly describe with clarity and crispness something that is actually nonsense and simply is not real.
There's a group of attorneys that host a podcast on SCOTUS that present a pretty convincing case for this interpretation, at least to me. Here's the most recent episode
I studied international politics in college and as a result I read not only a ton of news, but often the primary sources they were based on, and I was shocked by the amount of omissions and oversimplifications. I've never understood people who don't "trust" the news given that it is provably accurate and factual nearly all of the time. But I've long despised the arrogance from mainstream media wherein they confidently decide what to print and what not to print with no explanation or accountability on those decisions.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-124_8nk0.pdf
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