They should be doing what is right for the American people. There are clearly laws on the books today which infringe on individual freedoms (abortion), harm society as a whole (citizens united), etc.

The 'justice system' is supposed to be the government branch protecting the little guy from powerful elites. I've not often seen that. I see the opposite. If the legal system won't deliver justice, well, people are going to take things into their own hands whether that's 'justice' or not. If you bury your child, and you see the people ultimately responsible get away with it, I'm not sure I could really blame them.

Both sides have their merit, but some people want to have it both ways - do you want pragmatic judges or more democracy? They can often be mutually exclusive.

Except when it came to "textualism vs pragmatism", I've seen that the "textualist" judges have, in many cases, no problem being "pragmatists" when it suits their desired outcome on an issue.

For example, when Scalia dissented in some famous gay rights cases (I'm thinking of Lawrence v Texas specifically) his basic disgust at the thought of same sex relations was laid bare. Ironically, in Lawrence v Texas his dissent was basically correct - striking down laws against sodomy was a step towards gay marriage - but the gist of his argument was that gay marriage was such a god awful, horrible, unthinkable thing that any decision that allowed it must be prima facie wrong. He was basically warning "This decision will force us to allow gay marriage" as if, instead of that being a good thing, it was akin to allowing the apocalypse.

Scalia also authored the 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, a major second amendment case that held, for the first time, that individuals had a private right to own guns (not just "a well-regulated militia"). Read up on that case, as tons of "conservative" judicial scholars argued that it was "pulled from thin air" just as much as Roe v Wade was. From the Wikipedia page:

> Richard Posner, judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, compares Heller to Roe v. Wade, stating that it created a federal constitutional right that did not previously exist, and he asserts that the originalist method – to which Justice Antonin Scalia claimed to adhere – would have yielded the opposite result of the majority opinion.

>> The text of the amendment, whether viewed alone or in light of the concerns that actuated its adoption, creates no right to the private possession of guns for hunting or other sport, or for the defense of person or property. It is doubtful that the amendment could even be thought to require that members of state militias be allowed to keep weapons in their homes, since that would reduce the militias' effectiveness. Suppose part of a state's militia was engaged in combat and needed additional weaponry. Would the militia's commander have to collect the weapons from the homes of militiamen who had not been mobilized, as opposed to obtaining them from a storage facility? Since the purpose of the Second Amendment, judging from its language and background, was to assure the effectiveness of state militias, an interpretation that undermined their effectiveness by preventing states from making efficient arrangements for the storage and distribution of military weapons would not make sense.