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Comment by lucianbr | Hacker News Reader

What you say is true, and relevant to the discussion, but... it doesn't answer anything. A very long and dragged out process takes away the justness of it all, and the fact that the supreme court was involved does not change that in any way. If you're a victim, the courts are supposed to provide a remedy. Even the supreme court. That's at least part of their reason for existing. If you have to wait 14 years for a remedy, they're not doing their job right, no matter how supreme they are.

The fact that it goes the same in other countries also doesn't help. The system is broken everywhere, that's all.

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Sadly, "justice" isn't the job of the supreme court, it's to interpret the constituion. If it takes 10 months or 10 years, that's not an issue in the grand scheme of things.

For the US, the right to a speedy trial is for criminal cases, not civil. And I don't think breaking software licenses is a criminal act unless a mass of damages were done. That's basically the logic that LLM's are working off of right now; get into dubious lawsuits and become top of the food chain by the time the litigation settles.

Heck, quite a few pieces of tech work that way. Lootboxes came and went in western video games before it even had time to be challenged.

Just so you know, the role of the supreme court may not be 1:1 between what you're used to in the US and the rest of the world

In France the supreme court's role isn't tied to the constitution, just the law. They're to dictate which ways the law is to be interpreted and homogenize the decisions by the different lower courts.

We have a different (actually, two...) administrative organs that ensure that the law follows the constitution

> They're to dictate which ways the law is to be interpreted and homogenize the decisions by the different lower courts.

FWIW, the U.S. Supreme Court also has this role. People focus more on their constitutional cases because those are the most impactful/famous, but a lot of their workload is just interpreting normal laws, especially ones that have diverged among the various lower courts.

>People focus more on their constitutional cases because those are the most impactful/famous, but a lot of their workload is just interpreting normal laws

They have proportionately more constitutional cases because a case hitting the SCOTUS needs to be re-appealed at least twice, and the SCOTUS needs to choose to accept the case (4 out of 9 of the judges to be precise). The SCOTUS only takes a few dozen cases a year, so whatever remains tends to be larger issues.

But yes, very few cases are going to be Brown vs. the Board of Education levels of impactful. Perusing some cases of 2023 reveal one such case "simply" being:

>A case in which the Court will decide whether the "serious drug offense" definition in the Armed Career Criminal Act incorporates the federal drug schedules that were in effect at the time of the federal firearm offense or the federal drug schedules that were in effect at the time of the prior state drug offense.

Basically a bookkeeping case due to the different states as of late re-defining "serious drugs"

There is no explicit limit on the role of the supreme court. Nor is there any actual explicit role in the constitution for it. It's just one sentence. I think they even once tried a criminal case.

It deals with lots of constitutional issues, but Congress could basically just defund it and remit constitutional complaints to other venues if they wanted to. This is done in part with FISA and other national security measures. Congress deemed there to be no venue in the courts for a complaint.

Conseil constitutionnel + ?

I thought "conseil constitutionnel" on the judicial branch + "conseil d'état" on the administrative branch (french law is split in two branches), but apparently the "conseil constitutionnel" is doing both, the split is "cour de cassation" (supreme court) + "conseil d'état" (administrative supreme court), with the conseil constitutionnel doing its thing upstream unrelated to any of them.

Conseil d’état ?

I don't think so, are you sure? The Conseil d'Etat has two distinct roles (and thus two distinct branches):

- serving as the supreme court for the administrative "order" - as a judge, the CE does not check if laws are constitutionnal

- serving as legal counsel to the government - in which case it does check if bills put forward by the governement (i.e. not laws already adopted) are constitutionnal but this is merely advisory.

Justice in France has been broken and supremely inefficient for a very long time unfortunately.

I find that a lot of support services for individuals are like that in France, technically there but made ineffective because they are very slow.

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