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Comment by ggcdn | Hacker News Reader

But the Supreme Court doesn’t make the rules, it just interprets them. The rules are made by elected representatives.

Elected representatives get to try to make rules then the other side can chuck lawsuits at it for a decade trying to overturn it. The power to determine what rules are valid and how those rules are interpreted is a very powerful lever on how the country is run.

That's not how common law systems work. Things like executive privilege, qualified immunity, the fighting words doctrine, are all essentially just made up by judges.

Statutory law over-rides common law, however. If Congress passed a law explicitly overriding any of those, those would cease to exist.

>But the Supreme Court doesn’t make the rules, it just interprets them.

The supreme court literally decides whether X real-world activity is made illegal by Y law. Interpreting the rules is making rules.

They might not be directly elected, but they are political. If they weren't political we wouldn't divide them into liberal and conserative jusices. It seems like everyone already knows how they would 'interpret' any case involving abortion.

This doesn't seem to be such a problem in other countries. I don't really understand if that's because the judges are purposely appointed to be as partisan as possible, or whether the 'rules' are so badly written that they can be interpreted any way you like.

>whether the 'rules' are so badly written that they can be interpreted any way you like.

It's a philosophical difference in legal systems derived from the Napoleonic code (and more indirectly the Roman legal system, so it's common in continental Europe) vs. the English legal system (the US, Canada, India, Australia, etc)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#Common_law_legal_sy...

That isn't as big problem as you paint it. Yes, Trump was particularily "lucky" (for the lack of the better word) that during his single term in the office 3 Supreme Justices died, so he could appoint replacements. But Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton, George Bush senior, they each appointed 2 Justices. So it seems to me that the system is deliberately designed to capture long-term political trends - Democratic presidents appoint democratic judges, Repliblicans appoint Republicans, and the net result is: Supreme Court reflects society's deeply ingrained values, not its current mood.

Trump appointed 50% more judges in half the time. So, triple the rate.

And to your second point, the popular vote went Democratic in the last 7 of 9 elections (and electoral in 5 of 9) but 3 of 9 Supreme Court Justices are Democrat appointed. The court does not reflect our deeply ingrained values.

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