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Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
There are two issues that both are serious and systemic in the court.
One is that the conservative side is pretty much completely without shame. It's pure outcome oriented jurisprudence.
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FWIW, I think this is only true for the cases with a political valence, but since that is every case that most people notice, that's a big problem.
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Another is that just about all the justices are really bad at facts and generally pretty mediocre at understanding history, science, economics, or anything else other than law, and these flaws cross the ideological divide and result in bad decisions on both sides. Sotomoyer's misstatement of facts was no better or no worse than Gorsuch's in that, and the fact that both of them screwed up so badly on facts they'd been heavily briefed on shows how endemic the problem is.
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This is only a serious or systematic problem if cases are being decided on those grounds, which they shouldn't be. It's a marker of what the Court cares about because neither Sotomayor nor Gorsuch is writing those opinions alone -- they have highly capable law students working for them who are entirely capable of fact-checking things, if their justices want them to do it.
But as a question of statutory interpretation, it doesn't matter whether the number of child fatalities (or whatever it was) is 10K, 100K or a million -- it shouldn't change the answer to the question of what the statute says.
