More rubber stamps for you?
The idea of Judicial Review should not be allowed?
California has consumer protection acts in place. The California Supreme Court determined a set of rules to apply to judge those cases so they comport with California law and federal law.
Seems to me they did it and apparently four SCOTUS judges and two lower courts agreed. Five SCOTUS judges did not.
:rolleyes:
Then I guess we have five justices that believe the way to interpret law is to follow its plain meaning, and four that think the way to interpret law is to figure out what the law should really be, to serve the people best, and then see if they can’t craft a rationale that lets them decide that way.
There’s something to be said for the latter method, of course… as long as we have wise and fair judges, we’ll likely get good results from that method.
Pretty much how I see it. I don’t understand what procedural ruling could be made here. Do people really need to be reminded that they have to pay taxes? The binding arbitration amounts to someone announcing that tax laws really exist.
Are you trying to make a case that the four in the minority on this case are angling to be Philosopher Kings?
It is what I was on about before. I can cite cases where the justices you agree with magicked up stuff to make their case (e.g. show me where self defense is in the constitution or or tell me what law changed that made Plessy correct when it was decided and then Brown was correct in its day).
Either you think all the judges up there have honest legal opinions and admit that honest legal opinions can be divergent while still adhering to the law or make a case that the four in the minority here are activist judges while the five in the majority are dutifully doing their job.
Except that the opinion does not limit itself to arbitration of class claims regarding taxes charged on ostensibly free merchandise; it purports to resolve the issue as it pertains to class actions and arbitration clauses in general.
BRICKER seems to have fallen in love with majorities. He kept making a point about whether the majority of interrogators in the service believe they torture works. Now a 5 to 4 majority on the Supreme Cort says it all. Somehow many think a 5 to 4 makes it less likely we have reached a real truth. That 4 judges voting against a position does discredit to a great degree the decision reached. If it is simple and legal, the vote should be 9 to 0. How could anybody dispute the simple legal facts? But 4 hi9ghly qualified judges have.
This court is way right wing and pro corporate, so its decisions are flavored by that fact too.
Imagine how Whack-a-Mole would have argued back when the Supreme Court agreed that blacks were just 3/5ths of a person.
If you even dare to go into the idea that Supreme Court rulings have been overturned by future courts, you’re gonna make heads explode.
Of course honest legal opinions can differ while still adhering to the law.
But that’s not what I’m complaining about.
Consider Kyllo. I would have decided Kyllo differently than the Court did – to me, a “search” is not happening when the police stand outside your home, in the public street, and look at light that your house is emanating. Therefore, say I, it’s still not a search if they look at light in the infrared spectrum rather than the visible spectrum. The Court (including the much-reviled-on-the-SDMB Scalia) disagreed. Both of us reach our opinions, though, by the same honest process – we simply diverge on the result.
But when you toolbox of legal analysis includes things like “penumbras” and “emanations” instead of starting and ending with the text, inferences which are necessary for the text to be true, and inferences that are extremely closely tied to the text, then you’re doing your job as a judge and not angling to be a Philospher King.
The examples you raise are inapposite. It’s true that the right of self-defense doesn’t appear in the Second Amendment, any more than the Air Force is mentioned in Article I. But no one can reasonably contend that the failure to mention the Air Force means that Congress can fund the Navy and the Army but not the Air Force, because the existence of an Air Force is so closely tied to the concepts of Army and Navy that there is no question but that the Constitution allows it.
But… “it’s a foolish man that builds his house upon the sand.” The more inferential leaps one must take, the weaker the justification becomes. There’s a right to privacy - leap one. That right to privacy involves abortion - leap two. That right to abortions means that in the first trimester, the states cannot infringe on a woman’s decision to abort - leap three. At that point, it’s pretty clear we’ve left the grounds of “in the Constitution,” passed merrily by the waypoint of “fairly deducible from the text,” sailed past, “implied by the text,” and have landed squarely on “legislating from the bench.”
Plessy v. Ferguson: the problem was not one of law, but of fact. “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”
This is not so much a conclusion of law is it os one of fact: the Plessy court said that merely because a law separates the races is not enough to decide that one race is disadvantaged by it. Today, of course, we still have laws that separate people by gender, and we accept the Plessy rationale in those instances.
But the central facts in Plessy were based on a lie, a lie that everyone in the majority opinion knew but were unwilling to admit. The majority opinion said, in effect, that facilities and treatment of whites and blacks were equal – separate, yes, but equal. If that had been actually true, the case would have been much weaker. But of course it wasn’t true: the real reason everyone wanted the races separate was because they wanted to hand blacks the short end of the stick.
If, in Topeka, Kansas, the black and white school facilities were truly equal, with the same books, same quality and quantity of teachers, same funding for activities… would Brown have won?
The Brown Court’s decsion was as much prophylactic as it was anything else: a recognition that as long as racial classification was permitted, it would nbot lead to equality… that it was, as a matter of law, impossible to have true equality by keeping racial classifications alive with the imprimatur of the Constitution.
But the failing of Plessy, and the success of Brown, was not at its heart a matter of law – it was a matter of judicial notice of the facts.
Huh?
Slaves, not all black people, were considered 3/5 of a person for purposes of determining the population of a state to decide how many representatives they got in Congress (and in the Electoral College). The slave states wanted to count their slaves as residents because this would increase their power in Congress (and even with the 3/5 compromise southern states were able to wield undue power).
I do not know what case went before the Supreme Court about this but the text is pretty clear on that point and not sure how you’d argue against it.
Personally I would have argued against the institution of slavery itself back then and not the 3/5 compromise (although I would have argued against the compromise prior to its adoption and said slaves should not count at all when determining the population of a state to get seats in Congress).