Folk have too much stress and too little time to "keep their Republic."
That, plus the fact that many people prefer the chilling effect of laws that may or may not be enforceable, but which nobody is willing to "test", to the actual effects of laws that are well-understood.
It seems to me that there should be a specific legal defense that the defendant reasonably understood allegedly-criminal actions taken to be legal, and such defense should not be mooted by court decisions which occur subsequent to the actions that find that they are, in fact, not legal. The effect of this would be to rule that the judicial decisions' effects can not criminalize an activity ex post facto any more than can legislation.
If courts could separate the issues of "what might a reasonable person believe the law says" and "what does the law actually say", and recognize that they may be different, that would probably help things a lot.
This would allow a court to issue a ruling that, while people may have reasonably believed that a particular activity was legal, it isn't. Because people could have reasonably believed it to be legal prior to the ruling, nobody may be prosecuted for performing that activity when they could reasonably have believed it to be legal. After the court's ruling, however, reasonable people would no longer be able to believe the activity to be legal, and thus people could be prosecuted for future offenses.
Is anyone aware of any courts having ruled in such a fashion?