Only when representing something to a court, and even then, they can misrepresent as long as there is a colorable argument. Keep in mind that court opinions relating to contentious issues often contain gross and radical misrepresentation of binding precedent. In other words, judges do it too.
-- Maskell had to have known that he was butchering the text. Surely that must be an ethics breach, no? --
There's "ethics breach" in the general sense of being honest; which Maskell likely knows he is coloring the presentation (that is, he knows he is avoiding certain text, and that he is substituting his own paraphrase where it suits his end); and then there is a threshold that bothers the enforcer. The threshold varies, depending on the case. Again, sometimes the court itself engages in misleading and avoiding inconvenient precedent.
By and large, the courts are honest (most civil cases and criminal trials); but firearms law, "NBC," abortion, commerce clause, etc. are pretty much a show of force - the rational logic in those situations is out the window.
How do we ever recover from the mincemeat the irrational decisions have made of those issues you mentioned?
This is sort of an aside, but illustrates the mincemeat I’m talking about: The whole Roe v Wade decision centered around the claim that the word “person” in the 14th Amendment means “legal person”, not “biological person”. The Dred Scott decision had already decided that though Blacks are biological persons they are not “legal persons”, since the Constitution allowed for Blacks to be slaves even though the Bill of Rights gave guarantees of personal rights.
The 14th Amendment - according to all the legal precedent up to the Roe v Wade decision - extended to every person the legal protections of the Constitution and state and federal statutes. Yet if the 14th Amendment only applies to “legal persons” it never applied to Blacks, who have never been declared by the Constitution to be anything except what the courts had decided in Dred Scott: human livestock, or 2/3 of a person when calculating Congressional representation.
So now we’ve got a Constitutional Amendment which allows to Blacks - human livestock, according to the Dred Scott decision which was never reversed if the Roe v Wade logic is correct - the right to vote.
You could extend that farther and say that if human livestock is guaranteed the right to vote, then equine livestock should also be guaranteed the right to vote....
Etc ad nauseum. When you put arsenic in the water you end up with all kinds of crap, because the logic just doesn’t make sense.
When “logic” is random rather than having to make sense, there can’t be any rule of LAW; it’s all just the rule of MEN. A judge could say ANYTHING, and there would be no constraints.
It reminds me of the game where you have somebody write a paragraph of a story, and then pass that paragraph on to the next person who builds the story in whatever direction they want to go, then pass it on to the next person who does the same. A “living document” that can be shaped however the people who happen to be given the pen choose to shape it. If that is the US Constitution, then we don’t have a real Constitution, nor do we have the rule of law. We have the rule of men, and since all we have is a garbled legal mess, the whole country devolves into a rat-race to buy favors from the people who hold the pen at the moment.
That’s where we’re at right now. So how do we ever get back to sanity?