"The law must be stable, but never stand still."
—Jack McCoy, Law & Order ("The Ring")
"The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;—to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;—to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction;—to controversies to which the United States shall be a party;—to controversies between two or more states;—between a state and citizens of another state;—between citizens of different states;note —between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects."
—U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 2
—U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 2
“A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.”
— Robert Reich, Former U.S. Secretary of Labor
— Robert Reich, Former U.S. Secretary of Labor
"We’ve just forgotten because of the narrow slip of history in which the Supreme Court actually supported minority rights and the protection of those most at risk like it’s supposed to, but for most of the span of American history, the Supreme Court has mostly served to make things worse and entrench inequality. Whether it be Plessy v Ferguson or Dred Scott or the various other decisions that entrenched legal racism into the framework of law for centuries on end or it be the attempts to stymie any attempts to address the Great Depression in any meaningful way, the Supreme Court has often been on the wrong side of history and become an obstacle to overcome with Amendments or Executive Threats.
Heck, even its famous victories were often cases of overruling previous terrible decisions, undoing the damage of the past to make right what was painfully delayed. It also has always followed society, rather than lead it, though that has sometimes beaten the equally slow political path or enforcement path to freedoms. And it’s honestly what one would expect when you grab a bunch of the oldest fucks you can find and give them lifetime appointments with minimal oversight until they go senile and ever-more-out-of-touch with the rest of the world."
—Sadly, No!
on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Inc.
Heck, even its famous victories were often cases of overruling previous terrible decisions, undoing the damage of the past to make right what was painfully delayed. It also has always followed society, rather than lead it, though that has sometimes beaten the equally slow political path or enforcement path to freedoms. And it’s honestly what one would expect when you grab a bunch of the oldest fucks you can find and give them lifetime appointments with minimal oversight until they go senile and ever-more-out-of-touch with the rest of the world."
—Sadly, No!
on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Inc.