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by zaptheimpaler 601 days ago
This is again assuming that there is a binary right or wrong in how the law is applied. This is an ideal of the law, where there is precisely one law that applies to any given situation, describing exactly what is legal or not, with no ambiguity or contradiction. Speak to any lawyer or read about it, and you will find this is not true.

Here's a random article i came across today speaking about the ambiguity in the law applied to a particular case - https://archive.is/Z6V2Q . Just something I came across randomly, this is not uncommon. A quote:

> “I know it seems kind of strange that there isn’t a definitive answer to this, but that’s because the rule is based on a principle that can be applied in lots of different contexts, and it just happens that it hasn’t often been applied in this context before,” she said.

Here is a quote directly from the ruling overturning Chevron:

> Finally, the view that interpretation of ambiguous statutory provi- sions amounts to policymaking suited for political actors rather than courts is especially mistaken because it rests on a profound misconcep- tion of the judicial role. Resolution of statutory ambiguities involves legal interpretation, and that task does not suddenly become policy- making just because a court has an “agency to fall back on.” Kisor, 588 U. S., at 575. Courts interpret statutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences.

In other words, the court directly saying that it is their job to resolve legal ambiguities.

The logic you provide to uphold the overturning of Roe vs. Wade should apply just as well to the original Roe vs. Wade too. There was not any "glaring mistake" in the reasoning, there's just a lot of room for subjectivity.

1 comments

The assumption of judicial law is that there is an objective correct answer and that later rulings are more likely to arrive at it than their precedents.

The passage you quote does not contradict this. Note it states that court interpretation is

"based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences"

The ambiguity means that the correctness is a matter of probability, which implies that the probability of making a correct ruling increases with the amount of precedent a ruling has to fall back on.