Posted on 06/17/2019 10:00:06 PM PDT by bitt
In a sneaky Monday concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas laid the groundwork for the Supreme Court to overturn its own longstanding precedents in what may mark the beginning of efforts to destroy numerous landmark court decisions from the past decades.
The concurring opinion came in Gamble v. United States, a case regarding double jeopardy that Thomas used as a springboard to argue that the Supreme Court should review — and overturn — settled law where it is found to be “demonstrably erroneous.”
Constitutional law scholars told TPM that Thomas appeared to use the concurrence to signal to his fellow justices — and the wider public — that the new conservative majority is interested in overturning years of settled law.
“People can legitimately fear that this opinion provides a kind of intellectual cover and justification for the over-rulings that this new conservative majority may be about to engage in,” Samuel Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor and former Obama Administration Justice Department official, told TPM.
Melissa Murray, a professor at NYU Law, described it as an “opening salvo for those on the court…to take a more permissive view of stare decisis that is not nearly as deferential as what we’ve seen.”
(Excerpt) Read more at talkingpointsmemo.com ...
p
Yeah...that could go both ways...
That’s the point. Left-wingers rewrite the law with court decisions, then conservatives can’t undo that due to respect for stare decisis.
Once it gets to go both ways, we can undo the trainwreck of law foisted on us by lefties and blackmailed justices.
A worthwhile article on this topic by Amy Conan Barrett:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4734&context=ndlr
Why not tossed out ‘settled law’? The Obama judges care not one wit about objective law. They are like some hive mind where the ratcheting of Federal Power upward is the only consistent course of action.
I like to poke fun at the liberals about this subject. I like to mention that at one time, the Dred Scott decision, and Plessy vs. Ferguson were considered settled law. They were Supreme Court decisions which created precedent. Thus, per stare decisis, they should never have been reconsidered.
Bowers vs. Hardwick (upholding a state sodomy ban) was once settled law. The liberal/left had no qualms about overturning that precedent. It’s always “stare decisis as a brake on thee but not on me.”
We are living in judicial tyranny. Separation of powers is a figament of our imagination. When a lower court ruling can hold the entire country hostage, it’s time to stop the We The People sabotage. IMO.
Yes, another good case to point out. Stare decisis meant nothing to the liberals, if it does not support a liberal cause.
The switch to reliance upon case law that occurred long ago has never made sense to me. Taking the current system of legal precedent and then adding stare decisis on top seems to have created a one-way ratchet that serves to compound and lock in judicial error. It’s crazy to place so much reliance upon the original case, to the point that a wrongly decided case can become unchallengeable and therefore cast that error in stone. Then, that erroneous decision becomes the foundation for arguing future cases and further propagating the original error. That’s just nuts.
Stare Decisis
Pura mierda
Welp. There goes Heller. It was nice while it lasted.
Imagine how national business could change if Wickard v. Filburn went the way of the Dodo.
The purpose of the Commerce Clause, I believe, was to “keep regular” any commerce between the Several States. That suggests that a business must cross state lines before Uncle Sugar even gets to look at it. A farmer growing wheat to feed his own chickens does NOT impact the price of wheat on the world market and Congress can damn well “leave us alone” on the issue. Again.
And then leftists overturn those and it’s back and forth until it’s messed up so much there is no law.
Are you going to assert with a straight face that we genuinely have the rule of law now?
There are laws for the little people.
The best opinion in this case is the brilliant Gorsuch dissent trying to make prohibitions on double jeopardy actually mean something taking judicial notice of a fact we all know - the US criminal code has grown to the point that every adult American can be prosecuted for some violation or other.
Wow! This could get very, very interesting....
1 As the Court suggests, Congress is responsible for the proliferation of duplicative prosecutions for the same offenses by the States and the Federal Government. Ante, at 28. By legislating beyond its limited powers, Congress has taken from the People authority that they never gave. U. S. Const., Art. I, §8; The Federalist No. 22, p. 152 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) ("all legitimate authority" derives from "the consent of the people" (capitalization omitted)). And the Court has been complicit by blessing this questionable expansion of the Commerce Clause. See, e.g., Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U. S. 1, 57-74 (2005) (THOMAS, J., dissenting). Indeed, it seems possible that much of Title 18, among other parts of the U. S. Code, is premised on the Court’s incorrect interpretation of the Commerce Clause and is thus an incursion into the States’ general criminal jurisdiction and an imposition on the People’s liberty.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.