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Comment by saraid216 | Hacker News Reader

In America, there's no longer much legitimacy placed in legislation; we generally look to the judiciary for any actual governing thought these days.

Legislation is mostly seen as a stepping stone; it's not until it's been tested in court that a law is really valid.

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I find that sort of statement deeply disturbing.

Well, yes. So do I. That's why I felt I had to say it.

Sorry, I got that. I just didn't reflect it in my response.

It's also encouraging in a way. It's good to know that there are checks in place to prevent the enforcement of laws that violate our fundamental rights.

I suspect that some legislation has been written with this in mind for quite a while now. The laws themselves being an exercise in Overton window type thinking, not with any view that they would stand for long.

If true, this situation becomes somewhat self-perpetuating

Yes, I half expect to see something like:

  //Not sure what this line of code does, but if you 
  //delete it, you'll break the whole application

in a bill one day.

Nice analogy. Legislature writes the source code of the law and the judiciary tries their damnedest to compile it into an executable program, rejecting the parts that they can't make sense of.

Oh dear, no.

Legislature is the business people. The executive is the developers. The judiciary is the test team. That's how it's designed in the Constitution. The "original intent" of the judiciary was to be the guys waving their hands frantically saying, "Uh, this is a bug," while being completely ignored because there's a ship date to meet.

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