Reply To: Chisholm v. Georgia

#20592

Argument: I think you’re missing the overarching point of the lectures. You don’t just give power to people in the way you assert and expect them to act against injustice.

First – people need to learn and know what true justice is. Otherwise they will do things/allow things that are unjust.

Secondly – institutional arrangements matter. Even if you start off with people who have an understanding of justice and a desire to prevent injustice, the institutional framework and procedures in which they operate matter, because otherwise later people could use the same methods you are promoting here to do quite wrong things, all the while (sincerely) believing they are doing what is necessary to root out injustice.

The core overarching argument of this course is that the U.S. Constitution entered “failure mode” almost immediately after it was ratified, that the anti-rats were correct in their predictions, and that all the things those in power, particularly in judicial power, have done ultra vires – outside of the powers explicitly delegated to them in the constitution – have over time produced worse and worse injustices, a far cry from your apparent expectation that such methods will lead to sunlit uplands of a reduction of injustice through the use of their offices and suchever power they can accumulate via precedent (which we of course must follow! Stare Deicisis Uber Alles if it works to their benefit; – but not if it does not [this is their real argument against originalism] because, of course, power in their own hands is used to prevent injustices all over the nation and the world beyond, so when they have power in their own hands, these graces are strangers in their gates; but even this sort of consistently-having-two-standards argument is part of their our-ends-justify-our-means position, which is the Hamiltonian-Marshallian system we have inherited in reality, for they use this as a means to close off any attempt to reduce their power to do what they see as rooting out injustice while still allowing them to advance progressively in their great movement).