jcutonilli
Ultimate Member
- Mar 28, 2013
- 2,474
The situation I was presenting was an hypothetical one for the purpose of asking the question: is the judge merely someone who decides solely on the basis of the arguments presented to him, or is the judge also constrained by the court system's current interpretation of the Constitution and by the judicial precedent that has already been set?
Your argument suggests that it is the former, that the judge would contradict precedent if presented with a set of arguments that conflicted with current precedent, even when those arguments do not show current precedent to be Unconstitutional.
You already cited current precedent as to a requirement of intermediate scrutiny. While the definition of intermediate scrutiny might not contain that requirement, current precedent most certainly does. Is or is not the court constrained by current precedent, except where arguments show such precedent to be Unconstitutional?
The court does both, they are generally limited to the arguments presented and by precedent.
They certainly do validate that the various elements of the precedent are present.
It is not always clear what is really needed to meet these various elements of precedent.
I disagree. SCOTUS' main job is, and must be, to ensure that the court system and the rest of the government is consistently Constitutional. Their primary means of doing that is through point corrections to lower court decisions, because the expectation is that the lower courts will fall in line behind SCOTUS once SCOTUS has rendered a decision and that the lower courts aren't too stupid to apply the resulting precedent properly in later cases.
Put another way, consistency is worthless without that consistency being in the correct direction. Being consistently wrong is still wrong no matter how you slice it, and one could argue that being consistently wrong is worse than randomly being wrong.
As such, the above clearly means that SCOTUS' job is not merely to ensure consistency, but rather to ensure correct consistency.
Every case which is decided by the lower judiciary in a way that conflicts with the original intended meaning of the Constitution is a failure of that judiciary, regardless of the reason. The job of SCOTUS is to eliminate those failures, and it is a failure of SCOTUS every time it fails to correct such failures of the lower courts, for in doing so, SCOTUS is intentionally allowing Unconstitutional laws to remain in force. This is worse than a mere mistake, this is intentional. There is no worse travesty than that for a body whose purpose is to uphold the Supreme Law of the Land above all else. SCOTUS is the topmost court. It represents the entire judiciary in its role, and that's that.
I would say you are providing a clarification rather than a disagreement.
Courts typically view subjective public situations where there is no right or wrong answer as a policy choice situation. When you don't challenge the data directly, you are implicitly stating that there really is not something wrong with the data. By introducing competing data, you seem to be framing the problem as one that is subjective and best decided by a legislature.If the courts interpret conflicting data as a policy choice, what makes you believe that they won't likewise interpret a direct challenge to the government's data as a policy choice as well?
Sure, it could. But it also could make a legal decision about the validity of the data presented to it by either side, rather than declaring that a policy choice.
There are many things the court could do. But the question here is why the court would apply the label of "policy choice" to one challenge (the case where different data is presented, with the argument, whether implicit or explicit, that the other data is invalid or less valid) and not to the other challenge (the case where the challenge is to the interpretation of the government's data). The court could just as easily claim that the interpretation of data is a matter of policy and beyond the reach of the court, no? After all, interpretation of data isn't a matter of law, is it?
Whether something is a correlation or whether it demonstrates causation is not a policy choice. It is something objective that a court can decide.
That is most certainly a possibility. But at this point, given the sheer number and breadth of cases that have been lain before it, I'm skeptical. If that really is the reason that SCOTUS has refused to take a 2A case, then we can basically expect the lower courts to generally go uncorrected for very nearly every case, due to SCOTUS' paralyzing fear of breaking something else.
It is for reasons such as this that I argue that SCOTUS' primary duty must be to the Constitution itself, and to ensure that government stays within its bounds. Stare decisis must never override the Constitution's directives, and while the Court's decisions may have an extra-Constitutional impact on society, that problem is for the legislature to deal with. It is not the Court's problem that societal impact can arise from the Court correcting an Unconstitutional law or act -- such impact wouldn't have happened if the government had stayed within the bounds of the Constitution in the first place, which makes any such damage the direct fault of the government itself and not of the Court.
And if the Court is concerned about the legal repercussions to its own jurisprudence of properly deciding a case, well, it should have properly decided the other cases leading up to it in the first place, and established proper and correct jurisprudence, and then it wouldn't have that problem. Meaning, the Court should properly decide cases and just take its medicine if doing so affects prior jurisprudence.
I would question how much variability there actually is with respect to the 2A cases. I suspect there is very little variability with respect to 2A cases.
I think you are misinterpreting what I have said. SCOTUS gets way more cases than they can take. They have lots of choices and can be very picky when it comes to cases it will grant. They are willing to throw away lots of cases because they have lots of cases to choose from. It is more about picking knowns over unknowns.