I for one would support a Constitutional amendment to replace the Supreme Court with a process wherein we simply e-mail jacquesm for his opinion on how we should handle any given situation.
If we take your jest with some seriousness, a judiciary directly accountable to the people is a pretty bad idea. What you generally get is judges who like jacquesm wrap their political beliefs up in just enough pseudo legalese to seem acceptable to the lay public, but are quite wrong on the details (and often say things like the details are unimportant, "splitting legal hairs" etc when confronted with actual legal theory). This is extremely dangerous.
That isn't to say the current system precludes those people either (Earl Warren for example) because it is still a political process but it is more resistant.
That being said, I think that SCOTUS would be better served in cases of patents and sci/tech in general by using the process they currently use to handle important cases like the water disputes between Kansas and Nebraska being argued presently. SCOTUS appoints a special "master" to work on behalf of them to figure out the core issues and educate them. I could see someone like a Richard Posner being an excellent master for patent and SciTech internet related cases.
That isn't to say the current system precludes those people either (Earl Warren for example) because it is still a political process but it is more resistant.
That being said, I think that SCOTUS would be better served in cases of patents and sci/tech in general by using the process they currently use to handle important cases like the water disputes between Kansas and Nebraska being argued presently. SCOTUS appoints a special "master" to work on behalf of them to figure out the core issues and educate them. I could see someone like a Richard Posner being an excellent master for patent and SciTech internet related cases.