"I think The Comte is just pulling our leg in his latest string, to roil the waters for his entertainment."
Not really.
Truly, I think that the decision is abominable.
But then, I believe very firmly in the fundamental human right of private life, of family privacy, and of the inviolability of the family home.
There is no fundamental right of privacy under American law.
There is under French law.
And for this reason, I prefer the French law and have said so.
I have, on this thread, pointed out what I perceive to be the cause of the problem: the structure of the US government itself, with de facto supreme power reposing in the Supreme Court, regardless of what old documents or abstract theories to the contrary may say.
I think this is deplorable, but most Americans do not share my value system, and what I think is largely irrelevant.
I then switched from being a legal observer to being a real estate person. This is how I make my living. Certainly from the perspective of a developer, this US decision makes the strategic assemblage of larger terrain for exploitation much easier in America than it is in France. The old lady and her pigeon coop is not an imaginary figure! People like that can indeed derail projects in France that would allow for better economic exploitation of a community's resources. It is irritating to be arrested in one's tracks by a single stubborn grandmother.
But it is also comforting, in the end, that a single stubborn grandmother can sit on her little plot and force negotiations. Could she be ULTIMATELY bought out by the commune in France too? Perhaps, but the game is not worth the candle. It is expensive, arduous, lengthy, and often fails. Worse, you can get strikes and people damaging things by night when they take her side.
In America, things are much simpler in this regard.
This is economically better, certainly.
It is also not very good to people.
It's the law in America, and given that law, then there is no reason not to use it as aggressively as possible to maximize profits. That is the purpose of business, apres tout.
Statist?
Oh certainly.
The state must protect, educate, provide the basic protection against disease and starvation. What else can?
Americans don't really disagree.
Beyond that, I don't think the state is very helpful in over-regulating private business. It makes profitability hard...if one respects all of the regulations and laws and correctly reports everything, at any rate.
A virtue of having privacy as a fundamental human right is that it makes it hard for the agents of the state to penetrate the private sphere in order to obtain information.
But that is a whole different topic.
That describe any country you're familiar with?
I think it has already been explained to you, and you stubbornly simply insist on simply being French about it:
SCOTUS is constrained by (1) prevailing mores within the Guild; if it just went wild, the institution would lose prestige where it counted, and that would not be a good long term power retention strategy for SCOTUS, (2) the power of the president to nominate and the senate to confirm justices carefully chosen to reflect more popular views when court decisions become controversial (FDR did that, and got a SCOTUS more to his liking, which reminds me that the power to pass laws to "pack the court" is also lurking out there), (3) the power to pass laws restricting SCOTUS's jurisdiction, (4) the power of Congress to impeach, convict and remove, and (5) the ability of parties to not petition SCOTUS for certiorari (that often happens when a losing party at the lower court level, chooses not to petition, because they think they will lose at the SCOTUS level, and create a "bad" precedent.
Just because some of the above constraints rarely manifest themselves in action, does not mean that they do not exist as constraints (the Robes know that they are there).
Having said all of the above, within its sphere, SCOTUS does have the whip hand, and these days, chooses to use it, and the ensuing societal welts are visible for all to see.