The Judiciary is Political (for good or ill)

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Why was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954? Was there any of it that wouldn't have been equally valid in 1934 or 1914?

Why does a judge today rule DADT unconstitutional? Why now ten or fifteen years ago? The constitution hasn't changed in the interim.

Why is there a spate of state judges suddenly discovering that their state constitutions demand equality, up to and including same sex marriage? Nobody ever decided that in the 1970s, though the pertinent constitutional elements haven't changed in the interim.

A conservative critique of the federal judiciary is that judges at like a super-legislature. And you know what... they do. God knows how much right-wing judicial activism has been stuffed down out collective throat.

Judges tend to follow social trends. For good or ill.

The Pentagon Papers case would have been decided differently as a 1950s Cold War case. It made a big difference that a lot of people at the time had developed serious reservations about the Vietnam War.

As the public wavers on the particulars of the abortion debate judges have tended more and more to view abortion as a highly regulable right, not an absolute right of the individual. If the public was stronger on choice judges would be stronger on choice.

It troubles me... I feel that the judiciary should be more abstract and less sensitive to polls and whatever the tone of the evening news is, on both sides.

DADT should have been unconstitutional in 1994, not whenever the majority of the people came to view it as a silly policy (which I believe is the case in contemporary polling.)

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. Say it isn't so.

:wtf:
Political pre-school

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

2. What is obvious to you may not be obvious to all

The OP is just background discussion, obviously not groundbreaking political theory.

Not everyone has a sense of how closely decisions of what the constituton says hew to public opinion.