Reading the opinions, it is a breath of fresh air to see one of the branches of government relying upon fact and logical argument when discussing the issues. This is how America is supposed to work.
The problem is that when it comes to the really sticky, complex issues that affect huge swaths of human rights, it's very possible for justices, in your words, to "rely upon fact and logical argument," but base their end goal/optimization function on either "what did the founders of the country factually and logically intend" or "what do the norms and ideals of modern society suggest would be factually and logically sustainable" without regard to the opposite viewpoint.
A real balance between these viewpoints keeps the pendulum from swinging out of control; it serves as a low-pass filter on the often-wild steering of policy, or the whims of a short-term-focused electorate. But it's equally important that the ultimate power reside long-term with the people. And one very possible outcome is that our justices succumb simultaneously to a pandemic, during an administration that, to be as charitable as possible, does not seem particularly concerned with nuance, system stability, or universal enfranchisement. And it's a lot to ask of a justice to hold both the meta-meta-viewpoint and legal precision in mind, especially as it seems likely that constitutional questions will be in play as November approaches. All we can do is hope they will rise to the occasion.
Anything like that would not be something expected from country's best laywers. A judge given a quarter million USD salary must be the best of the best in performance, and not to deputise his most important duties.
> it's clear that regardless of their backgrounds and circumstances of their appointment, each justice is incredibly intelligent and engaged.
I heard of much less charitable descriptions of the process, with the most frequent being about the well known mental decline of some judges.
> The problem is that when it comes to the really sticky, complex issues that affect huge swaths of human rights, it's very possible for justices, in your words, to "rely upon fact and logical argument," but base their end goal/optimization function on either "what did the founders of the country factually and logically intend" or "what do the norms and ideals of modern society suggest would be factually and logically sustainable" without regard to the opposite viewpoint.
This is one of very many problems. US court system has become too much more than just a legal institute it should be.
The point my law instructor told me was that a judge just a lawyer on the government payroll, and half of them should be sent back to the law school so bad their skill level was. Then, if you can not trust half of them with most basic judicial duties, why should you entrust them with the fate of society, moral guidance, and big matter topics?
Basically, the elites in the West tend to think too many things about lawyers, when they shouldn't.
He was a lawyer by trade, and he was not happy with society putting lawyers in charge of running itself at all.
$250k is what 4th year lawyers at big firms like Cravath make. Partners can make 10x or more, and a lot of the work of partners is done by associates. [0]
If an associate has clerked for a supreme court justice, they can expect bonus of $400k. [1]
I don't know of a justice who has gone back to private practice, but it doesn't take too much to imagine that their salary would be much, much more than a quarter million USD.
[0]: https://abovethelaw.com/2018/06/first-firm-matches-the-new-a... [1]: https://abovethelaw.com/2018/11/400k-is-now-the-official-mar...
If you accept a salary for a job you actually do the job. Period.
The fact is that the world is too complicated to figure out via facts and logical analysis, and that’s why ultimate control of policy rests with elected politicians. We’re seeing this play out at a grand scale right now. In the US, classes are cancelled for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, German students went back to school a week ago. And in Sweden, lower schools were never even shut down in the first place. Logical analysis doesn’t tell you what are the appropriate trade offs between keeping the economy running and keeping people safe. What the purposes of the welfare state should be isn’t a fact waiting to be discovered through empirical methods. These are all political judgments. Even where facts and logical analysis could play a role, it often doesn’t, because experts don’t agree on often very simple facts, or the experts’ answers are too complicated to be actionable.
Where do you fit Italy, Spain, or even Portugal in your logica analysis? Because arguably the US is being hit harder than any of those countries and yet they are respecting their quarantine with notable results.
Meanwhile, neither Germany nor Sweden has suffered as much as neither Spain or Italy.
Sweden has had 2,300 COVID-19 deaths for 10 million people. The USA has 25 times as many deaths, but 32 times the population. Indeed, American cities with similar population and density to Stockholm have far fewer deaths. Washington DC is a little smaller and has similar density, but has had 165 deaths, versus over 1,100 in Stockholm. (Deaths are doubling in both countries every two weeks, so they seem to be at similar points in their overall trajectories.)
Similarly, the death rate in the US outside of NYC is comparable to that of Germany. (NYC has no counterpart in Germany; it’s almost three times as dense as Berlin, and more than twice as tense as Munich.)
But that’s a political decision the Swedes have made, and maybe it will prove to be the right one. It could be that, in the fall, the virus resurges in places where people have been sheltering and have not developed anti-bodies, while Swedes manage to avoid that resurgence because they never shut down. No expert can tell you which way it will be. They can tell you a discrete fact (sheltering in place will save more lives than otherwise), but are in no position to plug that fact into a value framework and reach a decision. But politicians must make a decision one way or the other.
You should check the facts. In the past few weeks New York alone reported more covid infections and deaths than Spain's total from the start of their outbreak, and New York has around 25% the population of Spain.
New York also has between 2 to 3 times the number of active covid cases that Spain has, which indicates the death count will only get far worse than what it already is.
> American cities with similar population and density to Stockholm
You may try to cherry pick anything, but the facts are the facts.
You’re the one who is cherry picking. 97.5% of America doesn’t live in NYC. What’s going on in NYC isn’t a proxy for the USA as a whole. If you want to talk about NYC, we can do that—we could compare to Barcelona or Madrid or something similar. NYC has suffered for some reasons very specific to it. (Due to its role as an international travel hub, it is estimated that up to 100 different people started chains of infection in NYC, versus less than 10 in California). But even including NYC, the USA as a whole hasn’t been as hard hit as Sweden, much less Spain.
And excluding NYC (where, again, 97.5% of Americans live), the USA has been even less hard hit. My state is about the size of Switzerland, and has had half as many deaths.
Country, Deaths / 1m pop, Cases / 1m pop
USA 171, 3,045
Spain 503, 4,907
Italy 446, 3,298
Sure if you cherry pick the worst city in the US and compare it to Italy or Spain then yes you can make it look like there are more cases in the US and be technically correct but overall the US is doing better then Italy and Spain.
I enjoy the irony of criticizing someone for cherry-picking, while using NY as a proxy for how the whole of the US is doing.
Perhaps you could've picked the state that is most directly comparable to Spain in population and land size, California: 1/10th as many people dead per million. (But that too would be cherry-picking)
Which for the US remais about 14 days (a marked imprvement over 2.14 when I first started looking at it), it's about 26 days for Italy.
When looking at exponential (or recently exponential) phenomena, rate-of-change matters vastly more than absolute value.
(And I'm not evev factoring in undercounting, testing failures,and other attempts to game the scoreboard here.)
It's also worth noting that the death curve probably has a 2-3 week lag behind the infection curve. At a 2 week doubling rate, even if you miraculously came out with a vaccine tomorrow and immunized the whole population you would still have yet to experience half of all deaths from the disease.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/23/upshot/five-w...
Fam is doing about as well as one could expect with two working parents and a 4yo stuck in the house.
Hope you and yours are holding up as well.
But not every case is divided 5–4 along the line of which party nominated the justice. There are a lot of ideological currents that don't fit cleanly into political parties
I saw a counterexample just this morning. An editorial was arguing that the Court's "interference" in the Michigan election threatens democracy, and the only solution is to pack the court.
This ruling split the judges in an uncommon way, which was even more welcome.
There are some disasters, but even then you get beautiful rebuttals (e.g. Kagan's dissent in Rucho v. Common Cause)
A single person churning out brilliant opinions over decades would be more impressive to me.
It’s 2020 and we still don’t have a gender equality amendment even though the majority of states want one.
...let alone amendments for healthcare as a right, abortion rights, and proportional representation.
Second of all, in practice, the influence of money in politics is overstated.
Hillary Clinton outspent[1][2] Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing[3][4] than Donald Trump, and still lost.
In the 2020 Democratic Primaries, Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion[5] (!!) on his campaign, and won just 9.4% of the popular vote (1.38% of pledged delegates).
Tom Steyer (a no-name billionaire), spent $343 million[6] on his election, and won a humiliating 0.38% of the popular vote (0% of pledged delegates). Interestingly, you would think he would have at least 1/3 of Bloomberg's vote, which suggests that the vast majority of the variance in Bloomberg's vote share can be attributed to his existing name recognition as a famous businessman/politician.
Bernie Sanders spent $195 million[7] on his election, having spent less than Bloomberg + Steyer and while having handily beaten both. Joe Biden spent $105 million[8] on his campaign, less than Bernie, and still beat him by 3 million votes.
Elizabeth Warren spent $121.31 million[9] on her campaign, and also handily beat Bloomberg + Steyer while having spent far less than them, while losing to Biden while having spent more than him.
Those are just the anecdotes (of which there are many more).
Decades of research[10] suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research in the last century found[11] that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear[12]. Even the studies[13] that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money actually causes wins. In fact, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to change their vote because they liked your ad.
So this argument is dubious both legally as well as prescriptively.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=n00000019
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=n00023864
[3] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/contributors?id=n00000019
[4] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/contributors?id=n00023864
[5] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/candidate...
[6] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/candidate...
[7] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/candidate...
[8] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/candidate...
[9] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/candidate...
[10] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2605401
[11] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002764203260415
[12] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138764?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...
[13] http://www.sas.rochester.edu/psc/clarke/214/Gerber98.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_v._Michigan_Chamber_of_...
and just because precedent is overturned doesn't mean it is wrong. I don't like Citizens United as much as the next person, but I think this requires a constitution change.
Citizens United was an instance of the government sliding down a slippery slope of precedent, which forced that precedent to be re-evaluated. The facts (the government attempting to punish someone for distributing a political movie about a political candidate) were so stark, they revealed the defects in the precedent that may have been obscured previously. Moreover, the government made clear at oral argument that there was no limiting principle to its position—it acknowledged that, had the Court ruled the other way, nothing stopped the government from book banning and other core free speech violations.
The the normal way this is maintained is to have narrow opinions on the specific issue at hand. As such I can agree politically and still say the ruling was unequivocally incorrect.
In my experience with the US Federal Gov't (through my wife and family) applying the boring law is the norm, and what's not normal is when political actors inject themselves or create a narrative about an issue to suit their purpose. US Federal Employees are deeply apolitical as a workplace culture.
We see a lot of the latter, but there's only so much bandwidth for it. Most work is boring and getting done in a professional manner
Your optimism is refreshing, but this is not how law works.
Judges and lawyers start from a conclusion, and then find case law to back up their conclusion.
Now, to be fair, most judges and lawyers who are competent tend not to go far off the established precedents. This is especially true at lower levels where higher judges are going to review your case--nobody wants to be the judge who gets overturned all the time.
Judges are not engineers. The law regards "truth" as subject to negotiation without objective boundaries. An engineer regards "truth" as "the thing that kicks your ass when you contradict it".