Forums

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I think what I'm trying to say to you (both) is that the loose handling of facts is a symptom, not a cause. Yes, the Court should be engaging in principled legal analysis, not outcome-oriented hackery. The vaccination decision was outcome-oriented hackery, a shitshow of purported statutory interpretation. The reason for that is *not* that the justices are incapable of factual (or historical) analysis. As it happens, that is not their forte, and it should surprise no one, because if you were designing an institution to do that stuff well, you wouldn't take nine geriatric lawyers, who get their jobs by being politically well-connected, and give them a staff of a few booksmart but utterly inexperienced law-school graduates. Would it be nice if they did a better job? Absolutely. But the much more fundamental problem is that the conservative movement has politicized the Court. The conservative majority just prevented the government from protecting workers from getting sick, because conservatives have decided to oppose vaccination out of opposition to seeing Biden succeed. (Find me a conservative who thinks that children with lice ought to be free to go to school and sit next to lice-free children because freedom.)

The vaccination decision totally pisses me off. In that context, it also pisses me off that someone could respond to it by saying that Sotomayor is stupid because she got a predicate fact wrong in a question in oral argument. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

eta: And why is this worth arguing about? If you have a traditionalist's faith in the Court as an institution, and in constitutional law as a discipline, then you can lament the decline of craft on the part of the justices, and think things like, if only their analysis and regard for the facts were a little better -- that's the kind of reform we need. I have lost that faith, in the Court and in constitutional law. I think conservatives have corrupted the Court, and constitutional law. Both are, broadly speaking, mechanisms to sort out disagreements about how run things, and most conservatives are too afraid that they are losing to be willing to compromise about such things. Blinding oneself to what conservatives are doing, to the Court and to the country, is a form of naivety that is part of the problem, not the solution.

My suggestion was that we put some non-lawyers on the court, because lawyers are just wonderful at arguing forever based on their objective and very, very bad at reasoning to a solution based on evidence.

Reading what you have written, I am more convinced than ever. Indeed, let's fill a lot of judicial positions with non-lawyers. We need less "legal reasoning" (there's an oxymoron!) and more problem solving.