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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be missing the point. The court doesn't make "incorrect" decisions because it cites incorrect facts, it makes decisions the reader finds incorrect and in some cases happens to cite incorrect facts in support of that. In the very first example, does anyone think that correcting Alito on the frequency of drug testing in the private sector would have changed his vote? No, he'd just have removed that sentence form his opinion and found the same way, because he doesn't personally find drug testing to be a violation of privacy in the way the plaintiffs do. That's not a factual decision.

The decisions are made, ultimately, out of personal conviction. If you want judges to issue decisions you agree with you need to arrange to have those slots filled with judges who agree with you.

Courts are political entities and always will be.

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And yet, judges -- and other people -- do in fact respond to argument, even if not as often as they would ideally. If you ignore this and pretend that they never do, you are still making a mistake.

Not in single cases they don't, at least not detectably. (Serious question: is there a story anywhere of a senior appelate judge with a tale about how they totally changed their long-held opinion after hearing a case? Don't think I've heard of one, though I'd love to read it if so.)

People change their opinions slowly and generally along with much larger shifts in public perception. In fact there was a fun psych result just recently that extra facts make people less likely to concede an argument, not more.

In essence, you're saying, 'They're not making mistakes. It's malice.' If your decision is based on incorrect data, you have no backing for that decision. It may be true to say that some judges are such partisan hacks that they would rule the way they did regardless of the information, but we should demand better.

>The review found an error in a landmark ruling, Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down part of the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice John Roberts used erroneous data to make claims about comparable rates of voter registration among blacks and whites in six southern states.

>In another case, Justice Anthony Kennedy falsely claimed that DNA analysis can be used to identify individual suspects in criminal cases with perfect accuracy.

This cannot be viewed as acceptable. This cannot be viewed as, 'Oh, well, they would have found a reason to rule that way anyway.' SC judges are not your (general 'your') drunk uncle, who has a right to be a buffoon unless he's hurting someone. When SC judges are buffoons, they will absolutely cause damage.

> Courts are political entities and always will be.

That is true.

I've come to believe that the ultimate role of the Supreme Court (and not of the lower courts) is the prevention of civil war. The role is essentially that of emitting a ruling that will keep the country from splitting so badly that factions square off and start shooting at each other. They goofed that up rather badly once. Their role is to provide a non-violent venue to debate our deepest differences, and forge a consenus of acceptable compromise. If they fail, we fracture.

The role of the lower courts is to apply S.C. decisions uniformly.

That said, I get rather annoyed at the "living constitution" crowd that wants to use the S.C. to get us all to collectively act like the constitution says something different than the plain words on the paper. If you don't like what it says, amend it for heaven's sake. Even the authors put forth a package of amendments before the ink was barely dry on the original. The way to change the constitution is to amend it, not re-re-re-interpret it.

I think the problem might be that plain words are still really spongy? A simple statement like "no vehicles allowed on public grass" isn't actually all that simple.

What happens when the words of the constitution apply to 95% of a given situation? 85%? 10%? Is it better to amend the constitution every time there's an edge case?

A lot of time you can just put a catchall textarea to cover all the rest of your input edge cases. For the law, that textarea is where all the action happens.

>I think the problem might be that plain words are still really spongy?

Many people make the argument that that's not a bug, its an intentional feature. As in, the Constitution was left open to interpretation on purpose.

You can also make the argument that even if it was an intentional feature, we've taken it too far.

The founders did leave a mechanism for amending the constitution. It is very difficult to use.

Do you think they underestimated the difficult of amending the Constitution using the process they suggested? Or maybe they didn't foresee having SCOTUS be the ultimate arbiters of the Constitution?

> to get us all to collectively act like the constitution says something different than the plain words on the paper.

That is itself an interpretation; those words aren't nearly as plain as you're pretending they are, they're intentionally vague, that's the only reason the constitution is so short. Legalese developed precisely because it's not at all simple to write something that's plain, clear, and not open to interpretation.

Your position presumes facts aren't part of how people arrive at their convictions to begin with. If you feed someone bad facts, they're going to come to bad conclusions, how can you deny this?

> If you want judges to issue decisions you agree with you need to arrange to have those slots filled with judges who agree with you.

I want judges who will change their minds based on evidence; who will apply logic and reason, not judges who vote based on uninformed personal convictions.

So, you want judges that aren't human. Based on my experience, most convictions are not based on facts. If you want fact-based convictions I think we need to look at replacing human judges with AI judges.

I reject your notion that humans aren't swayed by facts; categorically. You live in a world that exists because people are swayed by facts. Humans are swayed by facts, the best ones for sure, certainly not all. If you're not swayed by facts, you will not make a good judge and don't belong on the court.

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