Supreme Court Rules with Hobby Lobby on Contraception

Okay, I can take that challenge.

Looking ahead, I truly believe things are going to be better for most people, besides the rich.

Sure, there are some disturbing trends, but I don't generalize from (for example) a few court decisions to an overarching pessimistic view of the world.

 

I know it sounds like I'm overreacting but I see more bad things happening ..from the courts,congress,police abuse without any response from ppl and don't forget companies like Monsanto or the mercenary groups whose names I'm forgetting bc I don't want to dig much into certain things just to prove a point lol ..

I am glad you're optimistic though hopefully more good comes along then .

 

I think we're going about this the wrong way. Lets embrace corporate personhood and treat corporations COMPLETELY like peopl and start executing them.

 

And once again bad legal decisions come back to bite people on the ass.
In this case it's being used to justify not questioning a Fundamentalist Mormon about breaking child labor laws.

Judge Cites Hobby Lobby To Excuse Fundamentalist Mormon From Child Labor Testimony

 

Could've fucking seen that one coming. Oh, right, Justice Ginsburg did!

This is only the start. That damn Hobby Lobby decision is going to fuck us all.

 

Perhaps I spoke too soon.

 

Hey @Levite... aren't there a few passages in the Torah or Talmud about how there's a positive religious obligation for Jews to fight against certain things? I think it's time to start twisting this court case back in on itself.

 

Doesn't matter, the supreme courts job is not to decide if a law is "good" only if it is constitutional and properly followed. When you let judges decide law you don't have a republic, you have a Kritarchy.

 

Just because something is a bad idea doesn't mean it's unconstitutional.

But we often give judges broad discretion to decide what is going to happen in a given situation. It's called "fashioning a remedy," or in a broader sense, it's the entire law of Equity.

In medieval England (whence comes the basis for all American law), there were Law courts which had the power to issue any of a standard list of writs. Each of the writs had a Latin name (like "habeas corpus") and addressed a very specific type of situation.

But sometimes you'd have a problem for which there was no standard writ. To address those situations, they created a whole separate system of Equity courts, which had the power to examine the rights and wrongs of a situation and solve the problem. Equity courts had very different rules from Law courts. For example, the rule "to receive equity, you must do equity," that is, to seek redress from an Equity court, you had to have "clean hands," no fault in creating the bad situation.

Further along in the history of Anglo-American law, the two court systems were merged, but the concepts remain distinct in civil litigation to this day. You can frequently find references to "suits in Law or Equity."

"Law" generally includes lawsuits for specific known amounts of money, like back rent. "Equity" applies when one party is asking for an order or injunction to control the future behavior of the other party. (Statutes passed by legislatures created additional categories, such as wrongful death, which wasn't actionable under English common law.)

As a litigant, you're very unlikely to get a judge to issue an injunction if you are culpable at all in creating the problem. The old Equity rules still apply.

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Some background: Each US state started its legal system with a statement adopting all English common law up to July 4, 1776. Common law was almost entirely judge-made law, through centuries of accumulated legal precedent. Most fundamental US legal concepts and definitions were developed in England before 1776.

Note also that England was not a "democracy" at the time; judges held power as direct representatives of the King.

 

Yeah, but mostly against corruption, poverty, oppression, etc. We haven't been having much luck with any of those so far....

 

Well maybe we've found our in. It's a "substantial burden" on us to have to put up with things like corrupt corporations and congressmen or something.

 

Which is why I don't see the relevance to today's courts. The same people who complain about this sort of decision are the types who would go ape shit if conservative judges worked the same way instead of being constitutionalists.

 

The medieval stuff is quite relevant, because today's US courts are organized around those exact same concepts and principles.

Activist conservative judges (like the four on the Supreme Court) DO work exactly the same way, and the claim of being "constitutionalist" in any genuine sense is just a joke. It's code for "whatever advances the right-wing agenda."