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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Seems like an odd move to undercut the checks and balances courts are supposed to have over legislation. Enacting a law solely to undercut a court's decision seems spurious, and may blow back on both the legislation and the school.

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More like – legislature passed a law, a certain group of people took advantage of the law in ways the general public didn't intend, the courts said "we have to rule by the letter of the law", legislature amended the law, now most people happy again. This is exactly how the process should work.

This 1000%. The check that courts have over legislature is constitutionality. If a law is not what the legislature intended (or if the intention has changed) then they have the power to change their minds. Courts do not make laws, they interpret them.

Problem is that legislature has (in general) stopped doing their job so the "functional" court system is forced to re-interpret older and older laws; increasing their power relative to the other branches.

Also it's good when courts enforce poorly written laws as a forcing function to have law makers (legislature) write useful laws. Sometimes the laws as written are nearly useless

I don't agree. That's an overly-simplified, idealistic view.

Real people suffer real harms from the unintended consequences of poorly written laws. Our courts should help serve as a last line of defense against that, when appropriate.

Serving as a “last line of defense” is a policy choice. That turns courts from legal institutions to political institutions, and we don’t want them to be political institutions because policy is arbitrary and why we have legislatures in the first place: they’re functionally power-sharing forums, and the constitutions instituting them power-sharing agreements.

That just becomes a dictatorship of the judiciary, who often times cannot be voted out.

There are checks and balances in place for a reason.

Remember that (at least in the US) the three branches of government are supposed to be co-equal. Both the executive and legislative branches have a ton of power in deciding how law is created and applied.

Lastly, judges usually can't be voted out at the federal level, but there are often local elections for judges.

Congress has the ability to remove judges that are problematic.

That co-equal nonsense is Nixon era propaganda from when he was gearing up to fight impeachment.

The fact that Congress buys into it and sells the merch because it is made up of people who don’t want to actually do their job is just another of a long list of disappointments that Congress churns out on the regular, but to put this in perspective: by the letter of the Constitution only Congress can impeach and remove from office members of the other two branches. They are not co-equal, they are supreme and are the Article I branch for a good reason.

Congress certainly has some extraordinary powers. The exercise of those powers also requires an extraordinarily large hurdle be cleared.

Whereas the President can issue sweeping policy changes via executive order and veto non-supermajority legislation (a ONE person decision), Congress requires a majority in one chamber to initiate impeachment and a super-majority in the other to convict.

Look at Trump. Every reason in the world to impeach, and even that failed. So much for supremacy, it seems.

That’s the thing though. The President only has the powers as designated in the Constitution, mostly in Article II, and what Congress gives him per their legislative authority.

Any power they have given, they can also strip away. Any office they have instituted, they can also remove. Any cabinet position they created can also be removed. Any Presidential appointment including Article III judges and justices can be impeached and removed.

Executive orders only go as far as the President’s authority either over his branch (the entire Executive power) or through laws which he is charged to enforce. The reason he has a lot of discretion is precisely because Congress gives a lot of discretion, and they really don’t have to.

But, somehow we have managed to for a while now elect mostly mooks that don’t particularly want their power. The framers imagined branches of government which would jealously guard the powers they did have, but that doesn’t really work if a branch is not jealously guarding its own power. Open primaries were probably a mistake, because it leaves legislators vulnerable to primary challengers backed by Presidents and other powerful Government Officers.

> Real people suffer real harms from the unintended consequences of poorly written laws.

I agree. I was more talking about the kinds of cases where a law is pragmatically unenforceable. Eg: where you could never make a reasonable case that a thing happened, or that the penalties have given the courts leeway to bring basically no consequence to an action. Perhaps the part that could have been more clear was "enforce" to which I more meant "enact"? I didn't mean apply costly consequences so much as "go through the motions".

There also is another subcase where I didnt bring up before, such as police not bothering due to effort:outcome ratio -- forexample police don't bother to go after bicycle thieves in san francisco

Specifically, the US national legislature is failing. /State/ legislatures have no problem passing laws, some really good, and some absolutely terrifying.

I disagree this is not the intended purpose of environmental review laws. The whole point is to allow the citizens themselves to put checks on the unbounded growth of the population and the degradation of the environment as a result.

This appears to be politicians attempting to have their cake and eat it too. Environmental review laws are passed specifically because of the concerns raised by the citizens they represent. Whenever citizens then used those laws, the politicians step in and prevented that. It appears that they are attempting to appease two groups of constituents at the same time.

If anyone did this other than a politician it would be called breach of contract or possibly fraud. But yet, you call it "the process".

Moving people moving to Berkeley is good for the environment. It has a low carbon footprint per resident: https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps

To protect the environment, we must allow increased urban density so people are not forced into further suburban sprawl. Doing it in a place like Berkeley with limited heating/cooling energy needs is a no-brainer.

The fatal flaw of CEQA is it doesn’t contemplate the environmental impact of not building the project. Ultimately, the earth suffers as more damaging development occurs in less-regulated places.

Densifying cities does the opposite of degrading the environment, which is why CEQA is so bad.

Yeah and the sun may not come out tomorrow. This doesn't undercut a court's decision. The court interpreted the rules that the state legislature passed, and now that an unintended consequence of the prior passed rule manifested, the state changed the law. That's actually how it's supposed to work.

The exact opposite. The legislature (which passed this unanimously) AND the governor passed this legislation as a check on the power of the court. This happens all the time, e.g. famously when the US passed the 16th amendment to allow income tax.

Really they're just undoing a law that has had many unintended consequences. The court was just ruling based off this CEQA, so the legislature fixed the it.

They're interfering with a private lawsuit, and changing laws with retroactive effect to do so. That's what's so odd about this.

No, they're addressing a private lawsuit that was only permitted to proceed because of the court's erroneous (but reasonable) interpretation of the prior law.

So the legislature changed the law to make it explicitly clear that these types of lawsuits were never intended by the law.

But the new law explicitly contemplates these types of lawsuits. It doesn't say you can't sue this way. It says colleges and universities who are sued this way can't be compelled to do anything for 18 months. (Which invalidates the court judgment ordering UC Berkeley to stop enrolling students.) It is logically necessary, for this law to exist at all, that the original lawsuit was valid, and that the "remedy" was also valid. It's just that the remedy can't be imposed yet.

No, the law clearly states that enrollment increases are not, on their own, subject to CEQA:

From TTOTFL itself: "This bill would delete the provision requiring the environmental effects relating to changes in enrollment levels be considered in the EIR prepared for the long-range development plan. The bill would provide that enrollment or changes in enrollment, by themselves, do not constitute a project for purposes of CEQA."

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

It doesn't look like the relevant law is actually changing. There is a provision being deleted:

> Environmental effects relating to changes in enrollment levels shall be considered for each campus or medical center of public higher education in the environmental impact report prepared for the long range development plan for the campus or medical center.

This already doesn't say that enrollment levels require their own reviews; it says they have to be considered in the university's long-range development plan, which it must file for other reasons. (The bill also amends all instances of "long range development plan" to "long-range development plan". Not sure why.)

There are also two provisions being added. The one that looks good is:

> Enrollment or changes in enrollment, by themselves, do not constitute a project as defined in Section 21065.

Here's the other one:

> If a court determines that increases in campus population exceed the projections adopted in the most recent long-range development plan and analyzed in the supporting environmental impact report, and those increases result in significant environmental impacts, the court may order the campus or medical center to prepare a new, supplemental, or subsequent environmental impact report. Only if a new, supplemental, or subsequent environmental impact report has not been certified within 18 months of that order, the court may, pursuant to Sections 525 and 526 of the Code of Civil Procedure, enjoin increases in campus population that exceed the projections adopted in the most recent long-range development plan and analyzed in the supporting environmental impact report.

This pretty clearly requires the university's long-range development plan to consider the environmental impact of projected enrollment levels. What did we gain by moving that requirement from subsection (b) to subsection (e)?

You literally stated that the relevant law isn't changing...right before bringing up how the relevant law is changing, so I'm not really sure there's much point in continuing this discussion if you're just going to ignore countervailing facts to maintain your contrarian position.

I stated that the text of the law was changing in a way that made no change to the requirements imposed by the law. You can't see the difference?

Exactly, this was the result of an overly activist judgement. Signalled by a unanimous vote (how often does that happen in any state?) that the court overstepped it's bounds and gave it definitive statutes to rule by and reign it back in.

I think what we're seeing is the checks and balances in action. The courts can only "interpret" so forcefully before they're essentially usurping the authority of the legislature, so courts will sometimes make a "bad" ruling as if to say "we're just applying your crappy law; if you don't like it, amend it" (particularly sassy judges might be more direct about this).

The court didn’t have a personal opinion on the matter. They interpreted the statute. So the legislature changed the statute.

That is literally how the legislature is supposed to act when it feels that the court has erred in interpreting legislation.

I've seen this take a lot in the last half a day and it makes no sense at all. The court rules on the law. It's an ordinary statute, and the legislature changed it. There is no checks-and-balances conflict here. The statute says whatever the legislature says it says.

Yeah, from what I understand this is exactly how the separation of judicial and legislative powers is _meant_ to work.

The court's power is to interpret what is written. The legislature's power is to write the words. If the legislature doesn't like how the court interpreted the statute they're meant to rewrite it so that the intention is clearer.

Courts can only serve as checks and balances in three things:

1. Determining whether an executive action is consistent with legislated law.

2. Determining whether a piece of legislature is consistent with a more important piece of legislature (Constitutionality.)

3. Determining how two contradictory pieces of legislature are to be interpreted in practice. (A superset of #2.)

A court rules on the current state of law. Based on that ruling, the legislature can change the law as it sees fit, within the constraints that it operates under.

They are not a back-door way for people to subvert the power of legislature to draft laws those people don't like. If they were, they would be utterly absurd, because without the power to draft legislature, nobody would have a check or balance over the courts.

4. When two laws are actually in disagreement on a situation, they can prefer one over the other.

My understanding is that courts have to interpret existing law and “if you don’t like the court’s decision, change the law” is exactly how legislature is supposed to respond. Courts are not supposed to set policy, legislature is.

No that is exactly how it is supposed to work.

The judiciary rules on laws as written. And the legislature can then pass new laws to alter existing ones.

Not odd at all. The legislature changing the law to override a ruling is yet another of the checks and balances. hammer-paper-scissors

The way the American system works is that the legislature has the final say over statutory law, while the courts have the final say over constitutional law (modulo amendments).

That's not true, the legislature has final say over both statutory and constitutional law; it's just that the barrier to amending the constitution is higher than amending / passing statutory laws.

The Court's job is to interpret the law of its jurisdiction. If the legislature doesn't like the Court's ruling on some statutory law, it would then go through the process of amending the law. If the legislature doesn't like the Court's ruling on some constitutional matter, it would then go through the process of amending the Constitution. The latter process usually requires sufficiently more political will that sometimes a Court's ruling on a Constitutional matter is "final" from a practical standpoint.

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