The Lawyers Who Ate California

In short: it's lawsuits or edicts, and each nation picks its favorite poison.

In the Anglosphere countries, with legal systems that trace back to Common Law, there has long been a tendency to use the judiciary more and the executive less, relative to most European nations. The trend intensified in the mid-20th Century, when a new and expansive definition of "due process" aggressively expanded how many actions or behaviors could be considered violations.

I'm personally wary of our culture of lawsuits, and I'm personally wary of an aggressive interpretation of "due process." I understand that one of the goals was to try to atone for a long history of racial injustice, which is certainly a noble goal. Did lawsuits actually end racial injustice in the USA? I think we can ask whether this expanded understanding of due process is really achieving its goals.

I personally would like to see lawsuits limited, but I'm also aware that turning away from the judiciary would then very likely expand what is controlled directly by regulations by the executive branch. Every human society has internal conflicts, and the more complex our society gets, the more conflicts we have, and so the more that people turn to some branch of the government in hopes of getting some kind of address of grievances.

In other words, I'd like to see lawsuits limited, but I'm aware the need for some kind of conflict resolution will manifest in some other ways.

This is a complex topic, and I plan to write more about it at some point, but I cannot delineate a full theory in a comment on Hacker News. On my weblog, I plan to write on this topic later in the year, but for now I am still doing research.

Everybody seems to have a personal theory about demographic change in California. My conservative parents think it's woke social justice warriors, my activist friends think it's the lack of housing, and apparently this author thinks it's legal bureaucracy run amok. It would be really nice to see some evidence the next time this claim is made...

It sounds like this person's image of California is based on a layover at LAX.

First:

> The story also turns out to be in part about why California, which had a growth streak dating back to the gold rush, saw it broken in 2020, when the population shrank by 182,000, causing a first-ever loss of a congressional seat.

It seems disingenuous at best (and intellectually dishonest at worst) to talk about what happened in 2020 without even mentioning the unprecedented pandemic, Not a great start.

Second, using the DEFH lawsuit against Activision-Blizzard as any kind of example of government overreach is on very shaky grounds. For anyone unfamiliar iwth the case, let me recount some highlights:

1. Employees engaged in cube crawls where they'd get drunk and go from cube to cube harassing female employees;

2. One female employee was in a relationship with a superior. That superior showed a photo of her vagine at a company offsite. That woman committed suicide;

3. Breastfeeding mothers would store breast milk that they would pump while at work in a fridge they shared with beer for some reason. They complained that their breast milk was being stolen without any action taken.

The state spent 2 years investigating these claims.

To me this is exactly what the government should be doing so you have a pretty high bar to meet to show this lawsuit is evidence of any kind of state wrongdoing.