SCOTUS judges 'doxxed' after overturning Roe vs. Wade | Hacker News Reader

SCOTUS judges 'doxxed' after overturning Roe vs. Wade

theregister.com

18 pointsmikece20 comments

When you’re trying to make the argument that privacy is fundamentally important, you can strengthen your argument by respecting other people’s privacy.

These judges have opinions about interpretations of written law. If you want your views and beliefs codified into law, contact your representatives, not the judges - which is how it should have dealt with in the first place - as described by the opinion.

Personal attacks/threats on judges is a saddening sight for the health of our democracy.

You are lying to yourself if you believe this is an issue of law interpretation.

It cannot be a coincidence that justices vote with cultural and party lines with great consistency.

Judges are put in place as political weapons to achieve specific results. In this case, deployed to control women. Your advice for them to sit down, be quiet, and mind their manners is quaint and ineffective.

>When you’re trying to make the argument that privacy is fundamentally important, you can strengthen your argument by respecting other people’s privacy.

Why is the converse not true as well? If one believes the constitution does not protect the right to individual privacy, then don't expect it.

That's not what the ruling was though. And it makes sense. "If" a fetus is a viable human at some point, then claiming privacy when ending its life wouldn't pass muster any more than privately killing someone in your basement would. It's not a matter of privacy. Privacy has nothing to do with it, which was their point.

Roe was always on shaky ground and it's surprising it took 50 years to get overturned. Meanwhile, these issues can and should be solved through legislation, not cutesy legal arguments in front of judges.

"These judges have ruled that privacy is not important enough to be guaranteed. Therefore, no good will come of showing them the dangers of a lack of privacy."

This is called a proof by contradiction. You strengthen the argument that "privacy is important" by assuming it's not, then showing how that leads to contradictory (or, in this less formal scenario, undesirable) results. That then supports the argument that privacy is important. And as it creates personal and emotional investments for the judges making these decisions, it's one of the most effective ways to do so.

People rarely listen to reason and logic unless they're professional STEM folks discussing STEM topics (and sometimes not even then). People often listen to personal consequences of their decisions.

Am I saying it's right that they were doxxed? No. But it certainly is a sound and effective argument against the judges' decision, and perhaps might be the lesser of two evils here if it actually motivates them to rethink their belief that privacy isn't/shouldn't be legally protected in the US.

> These judges have ruled that privacy is not important enough to be guaranteed.

You fundamentally misunderstand the role of judges. They do not rule on how important different values are - they rule on what the written law means.

Actually, they interpret what the written law means. Which is an important distinction, because interpretation is always filtered through personal biases. During Roe v Wade, the then-justices decided the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment ensured a right to privacy. That's how they interpreted the Constitution. And in fact, it's how the Supreme Court justices interpreted the Constitution in many other cases as well, such as Lawrence v Texas, over many decades.

Now, these particular justices have decided that the Due Process clause doesn't actually ensure a right to privacy. So what changed? Not the Constitution -- the text of the 14th Amendment has been the same since its ratification. The difference is that these particular justices believe that the text means something different than what every other set of Supreme Court justices before them believed. And that belief doesn't come from the text -- which again, hasn't changed -- but from their personal beliefs about whether privacy is important enough to protect or not.

> So what changed? Not the Constitution -- the text of the 14th Amendment has been the same since its ratification. The difference is that these particular justices believe that the text means something different than what every other set of Supreme Court justices before them believed.

How can you make the "what changed" argument, and not also apply it to the Roe v. Wade ruling itself? You do realize that 105 years passed between the ratification of the 14th Amendment, and the Supreme Court realizing that it banned abortion? The authors of the 14th were alive for much of that time - you'd think they would have said something.

Roe v Wade was the first time the question of abortion rights was put before the supreme court. "What changed" there was "people started asking for the first time whether the Constitution supports these rights". But now we've had nearly 50 years since then, so you can't say "no one's ever looked at this before".

I bet the authors of the 14th Amendment also didn't say anything about computers or hacking, yet in 2021 the Supreme Court ruled that the Due Process clause affected how laws about what constitutes "unauthorized computer access" are to be enforced (Van Buren vs United States).

The Constitution was explicitly written with knowledge (and admission) that it could not, and would not try to, enumerate every possible scenario in which it may or may not apply in the future. The idea that "no one said this clause applies to this case before anyone asked if it did" holds any meaning is ridiculous. That's why the Supreme Court exists: to take specific cases and see if anything in the Constitution applies to them, whether it explicitly says it does or not.

> Roe v Wade was the first time the question of abortion rights was put before the supreme court.

If the Supreme Court does not hear a case, it is tacitly saying it agrees with the lower court's decision. If in 105 years no-one argued before the lower or supreme courts that abortion is constitutionally protected (or did argue it, but did not convince any judges), that's a strong signal that the legal profession, courts included, did not consider abortion bans unconstitutional.

It stretches credulity that in a century of abortion convictions, no lawyer thought to argue their constitutionality, and no judge considered it. It's not impossible, but I'd need a decent source to believe it.

> If the Supreme Court does not hear a case, it is tacitly saying it agrees with the lower court's decision.

No, it's not, which is why denials of cert. do not elevate the lower court’s decisions to the precedential effect of a Supreme Court decision.

The Supreme Court takes a very limited share of the cases offered to it in its discretionary jurisdiction each term, and the factors involved in those decisions typically include whether or not there is a split between the Courts of Appeals on the question raised and the degree to which Court perceives the case to be one of national importance among other factors, the decision is not centrally about the merits of the case.

Also, Roe v. Wade was not the first abortion-law case to come before the Supreme Court, just the first to raise and be decided on the question of whether abortion itself was protected. Other challenges were on different grounds, e.g. U.S. v. Vuitch (1971) unsuccessfully challenging Washington, D.C.’s abortion law (which had maternal health exceptions) for unconstitutional vagueness. Most lawyers prefer to argue things which are established in law rather than novel theories (because trial courts aren't prone to accept novel theories, because clients get a lot better result being cleared by a trial court than exhausting appeals through the State and then appealing to the appropriate federal courts, and for other reasons.)

If that were true, the political affiliations of justices would be irrelevant, and yet it has a very high correlation with how they rule on cases.

To ignore this reality is to pretend that the way you imagine the world should be is how it actually is.

I agree with this... and my understanding of their logic is that it was never a federal issue and should have been a state issue the whole time.

Now, I personally feel the states should ALSO say that it is none of their business and treat it as such. That would be the proper way.

So I agree with their ruling, but I also agree that unfortunately the states are going to have their own laws. I much prefer this over the government controlling the entire country via this method.

The whole idea of statehood is that people of that state vote on the direction of the state. You then move around the US to find a state that is more aligned with your values.

Just my 2c.

> The whole idea of statehood is that people of that state vote on the direction of the state. You then move around the US to find a state that is more aligned with your values.

And the whole point of being a federation with a federal congress, a president, and a Supreme Court is that some issues are important enough to enforce regulations or freedoms across all the states as a whole. If you don't want federal governance, then you're arguing in favor of each state basically becoming their own country, with free movement agreements between them. Which is quite different to what how the US actually is structured.

I don't see what they're so mad about. There's no enumerated right of privacy in the Constitution, after all, and it's not deeply rooted in our history and traditions, so they have nothing to complain about. (Alito's words, not mine)

Do you really think these judges (that lied under oath during their confirmation, and made absolute nonsense claims in their decision) won’t immediately override any federal legislation as states rights?

They have already made the EPA, CRA, etc as close to meaningless as possible.

It's a darn shame. Congress should do something about that.

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