As a hobby, I used to listen to Supreme Court oral arguments. This is an odd hobby, but it teaches you a lot about how the court system works. And also a bunch of weird, made-up rules that judges believe in.

A lot of these made up rules are, oddly enough, focused on weird superstitions float around the justice system that hold that judges aren't supposed to decide things. For instance, it's often held that if the justices can decide a case based on its most superficial factors, they should not reach the question of the legal principles involved. This isn't found anywhere in the Constitution or anything, and in fact is contrary to most accounts of legal stability, which imply it would be a good thing to know what the laws are.

The judges on the Supreme Court Of The United States (scotus) are called "justices" for some reason. 🤷. In case you were confused.

Anyway, I tend to agree that the "conservative" bloc of SCOTUS justices typically does a better "job" at interpreting "what the Constitution actually means". Some would dispute that this is even the proper goal of a SCOTUS justices, but whatever. I might write about that sometime.

I also rarely ever read SCOTUS opinions, which you should really do if you want to get a better idea of how the law actually works, post the arguments. But most of them are too boring for me to bother devoting the time. In the oral you can often get a sense how the judges are leaning, although I never honed this skill purposeully, either.

Despite that, my favorite justice (after the demise of Scalia, who had great bons mots and great points) was Justice Breyer, who liked to tell long-winded, interesting anecdote thought experiments in lieu of asking an actual question during the oral arguments. I don't know if this was good for the court somehow, but it was great radio. He was replaced on his retirement with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is more of a normal type judge, which is a shame.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has a bad reputation among scotus-watchers for being more of a "naked partisan" than usual; just doing whatever the Democratic Party of The United States Of America (who were responsible for her appointment) would want. Cf the previous statement about "the proper goal of a SCOTUS justices". I'm not sure if this is right or not (maybe she just shares a judicial philosophy with most democrats?) but I see where people are coming from with this assessment.

Another interesting case is the bizarre double-partisanship of Roberts, who seems to try to split the difference between what the two parties want, to try to preserve the institutional reputation of the court. Some people think this makes his court ironically seem less legitimate, as they are no longer clearly "just calling balls and strikes", so to speak, and instead are more like an arm of the legislature. But whatever.

There are also other judges, who have their own reputations, of which I won't even give a brief caricature here, as I have done above for the two I thought the most relevant.

But, anyway, the point of this blogpost is that on several hot-button cases I've found myself agreeing with Jackson on the meta-legal principle of judicial authority, and wasn't convinced there was a good argument against her. For instance, here is my caricature of the Jackson portions of the case in which "universal injunctions" were found to be illegal.

J. Jackson: isn't the point of the judiciary to prevent the government from doing illegal things?

Attorney: no comment.

J. J: you suggest that judges could form a class action lawsuit against the government, but that seems inconsistent with your other arguments. If they do a class-action, will you be back here in 6 months arguing that that's unconstitutional as well?

A: Maybe not.

J. J: if the injunction can't stop the government action per se, only for individual cases, couldn't the government just drop the individual cases each time, and the wrong would never be righted for the vast majority of people, since it would never get to court?

A: Um, uh.

Some other justices have weird, untenable views that somehow try to get the judges out of the position of telling us what the laws are — despite the fact that telling us what the laws mean is the business they are in, a position that I guess they got themselves into with _Marbury v. Madison_. I admit I've never reviewed that case. But it seems to me that it's obvious, at least in how our legal system is currently "supposed to work", that the judiciary has the power to stop the government from doing anything illegal. That's just the whole point of the judiciary system, at this point.

(Similarly, I have very little time for justices who don't realize that the states have the presumptive ability to make all sorts of laws that they want. That's also the point of them being separate governments.)

The whole point of constitutionalism is that the government is prevented from doing things contrary to the constitution. Otherwise we might as well not have one of those, duh! So, who's gonna stop them? Maybe they're just supposed to stop themselves. This makes the bill of rights more like a bill of guidelines, but whatever. (In some sense, it's inevitable that the government "has to stop itself", unless the people who are supposed to stop them are, like, mobs of citizens or something.) (You could also argue that for a lot of its history the Supreme Court has been treating the bill of rights as more like a bill of guidelines.) Sometimes the politicians directly consider whether something is unconstitutional and don't do it if so, and good for them! For real. But the system we've mostly decided on, as a country, is that we do a little song and dance where the congress passes laws and the executive does things and then the supreme court reviews both of those and says whether or not it's constitutional, and then those other bodies shake their heads to show that they disagree vituperously but then decide to go along with it anyway, even though the SCOTUS doesn't have an army or anything. (They have, like, 6 guys with guns or something like that.) In part this is maybe because we realize that if anyone actually does violate the constitution, blatantly, this would be a huge violation and we would all turn on them. (Despite some objections to the contrary, the Constitution *is* a suicide pact.) Or maybe not! Most people seem bad at figuring out what a constitutional violation is anyway, so maybe the system just limps along out of inertia, like most things. Either way, the song and dance we have is actually pretty good. This bizarre politicop̈sychod̈rama we have in which the supreme court plays the rôle of America's superego and congress its ego and the executive its id, actually seems to be working out pretty well. It's a working system that gives benefits of legal stability and clarity, and has guarded us against the much greater type of abuses of power that have been known to arise from time to time in the history of political systems. Our current system also seems like a fair interpretation of "The Constitution", Article III, Section 2, in relevant part: "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".

It's just a shame that on the *substance* of the law, Justice Jackson believes in a bunch of made up laws that are bad.