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[Enemy post]

Not yet.

[Maximum Spin]

The Supreme Court is actually an elaborate hoax.

[MrRoboto75]

A supreme court is just a normal court with added tomatoes and sour cream.

[voliol]

As a non-American, I'm all on-board. Who gets to answer for the dead though?

[Dostoevsky]

So, in short anything which goes up to the supreme court would get stasised into an eternal limbo state because everyone can't meet? Or would it essentially be a referendum? That sounds pretty sensible, actually. If the courts can't decide something, it gets tossed to the public to decide?

To give an actually serious answer to this (as the failure to reach a decision does emerge in other scenarios as well), then you'd be left with the lower court ruling remaining intact. It would effectively nullify the Supreme Court as an entity, which would mean that there would be no more legal opinions binding the entire United States. (Sort of; court decisions relating to national agency actions would still have national ramifications.) Whether this is a good or bad outcome depends on one's philosophy, or just one's opinion regarding the trend of lower court opinions on a particular topic across jurisdictions.

One odd part of this is that it wouldn't be boiling down to different states, but a mix of federal appellate court jurisdictions - each of which are multi-state, and don't always make sense. E.g. Idaho would be stuck in the notably-liberal 9th circuit.

Edit: Wrote too quickly and forgot a few other implications. First, legal conflicts between states would no longer have an arbiter. So water rights disputes (often what leads to this) or border disputes wouldn't have formal resolution. Second, if I'm remembering right the federal court system would no longer have a way to override state supreme court decisions regarding federal matters - this is most relevant for situations where the federal constitution would override the outcome. For example, if [X state]'s supreme court holds that a racist law is fine, then normally the federal S. Ct. would step in and say 'nope, the federal constitution doesn't allow that'.

FURTHER EDIT: See a few posts down.

(I'm probably forgetting a few other situations.)

The other question that would get raised: if everyone was a justice of the supreme court, who would argue the case?

[feelotraveller]

I'm sure somebody would recuse themselves, for the right price.

[ZBridges]

The dead, through Ouija boards.

[bloop_bleep]

"Let the records show that the late esteemed Thomas Jefferson proclaimed "PHSJHVNDNCKSDUNQPEFJBK", which as far as we know is a rousing and impassioned Founding Father opinion in favor of the soft drink subsidy bill."

[Egan_BW]

The obvious solution is to have Toady implement everything in the Terrible Suggestions Thread, causing DF to leech into reality. Then we could have necromancers turn all the dead into intelligent undead who are thus able to provide an opinion.

[Dostoevsky]

For what it's worth, just realized my answer was wrong. Cases would be stuck 'in appeal' for forever, basically, which for criminal cases I don't think would change from what I wrote above, but for civil cases would (I think) mean nothing be enforced at all except in situations where preliminary injunctions were granted. Which would then make district courts (fragmented across portions of each state) the first and last court of power, with basically no meaningful ability to appeal at all.

[Maximum Spin]

For what it's worth, just realized my answer was wrong. Cases would be stuck 'in appeal' for forever, basically, which for criminal cases I don't think would change from what I wrote above, but for civil cases would (I think) mean nothing be enforced at all except in situations where preliminary injunctions were granted. Which would then make district courts (fragmented across portions of each state) the first and last court of power, with basically no meaningful ability to appeal at all.

Better idea, abolish all the courts. Nobody really needs to sue anybody anyway.

[Dostoevsky]

While unpopular in law schools these days, there's a theory of legal analysis that looks as much as the human processes of law as the stuff written on the page. Part of that is looking at community systems of reputation, action, etc. that are not technically legal but can still work just as well (or even better) than the formal legal structure in the area. Can work very well for local day-to-day disputes, but doesn't scale up that well.

Obviously this would not work very well at protecting against widespread prejudice against minority groups, however.

[Maximum Spin]

We should abolish those too.

You might be wondering whether I meant "informal community justice systems" or "minority groups" or maybe "law schools". The answer is "yes".

[Dostoevsky]

Abolishing minority groups (I'm assuming the concept, not, er, abolishing the literal people) would certainly be a nice thing in theory.

[delphonso]

So, I've got a political science question.

The electoral college is fucked. Bush and Trump won without popular votes which I think everyone can agree is shitty, even if they delude themselves into thinking "they didn't really lose the popular vote."

The sort of high school response is to think, "Well just get rid of the electoral college and do a direct vote." Which has problems of its own. The electoral college is supposed to be a Republican organization (not the political party, but the politic) offering representation of otherwise minority groups who would be trampled in a pure democracy.

But that doesn't hold up for the presidential election, right? Why should a Kansas vote be worth more than a California vote, on the individual level?

Am I getting that right? Also, are there any solutions being proposed that don't include just throwing out the whole system and starting from scratch?