[IgorPartola]

:). Thanks for the link, it was very educational. However, it actually doesn't seem to apply in this case: "United States federal courts only act as interpreters of statutes and the constitution by elaborating and precisely defining the broad language (connotation 1(b) above), but, unlike state courts, do not act as an independent source of common law (connotation 1(a) above)." [1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#United_States_federa...

[ajkessler]

In theory, you're right: courts don't make laws. In practice, courts make law every day. This is intuitively obvious (e.g. If law says you can't do A or C but says nothing about B, and the court says "B is really just like A and C, so B is also prohibited under the law", the court has just made law)[edit: perhaps not so obvious if you don't practice law, but courts do this every day], but also goes deeper: The very idea of judicial review itself was invented by the courts (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison).

[IgorPartola]

Neat. I wonder what our society would have looked like today if Marshall lost that one (had a bad day, spilled his coffee).