[autoexec]

> Punishing judges for ruling in ways which are later overturned would destroy rule of law at a fundamental level.

Not where people's most fundamental rights are concerned. What it would do is cause judges to err on the side of caution before making a ruling that would violate the constitution which is exactly what we want judges to do.

[rainsford]

That's obviously unworkable if you consider that even the Supreme Court's interpretation of fundamental rights can change over time. If a future Supreme Court overturns a prior Supreme Court decision in a way that expands a particular right, do we punish all the judges who followed the previous precedent? If we do, then we have a judicial system that encourages individual judges to ignore the Supreme Court, which doesn't seem like a good setup.

But more fundamentally, the system you're proposing doesn't just incentivize judges to err on the side of caution, it incentivizes them to never rule in favor of the government and just punt the decision to the next level. If the cost of ever being overturned on appeal in favor of an individual's rights is losing their job, while there is no corresponding downside of ruling the other way, there's basically no reason to ever risk granting a warrant, for example.

[immibis]

Then a Republican judge could just rule that obviously constitutional things were unconstitutional and punish all judges who don't agree, right?

[autoexec]

Judges who violate the basic rights of other judges would also be subject to some level of accountability though. At a certain point, we have to trust government officials to at least attempt to do their jobs and we need to have ways to address the situation when they don't. It shouldn't matter if that judge is a democrat or a republican.

Right now there is currently zero accountability. At best, when a judge violates people's constitutional rights some small number of those people will be able to get an unjust ruling overturned at which point they might be released from prison or might get some monetary payout at the expense of taxpayers, but the judge is still free to do whatever they want without consequence knowing that at least a few people will be unable to assert their rights.

Considering that unaccountable judges are where we're starting from, I think having a means to make judges accountable can only improve things. Given the choice between judges being able to violate people's rights without any accountability or a system where judges have some level of accountability for the most egregious violations of our rights, even while that system requires us to make sure that it isn't being clearly abused, I think we're better off with the option to get some accountability where it's needed.

It doesn't need to be a perfect system to be a better one, and it feels like we could put some guardrails in place to keep the amount of obvious abuse down. It's difficult to believe that judges willfully violating people's rights without consequence is an unsolvable problem, let alone one that couldn't possibly be improved somehow.