Text and tradition are uniquely important to the Supreme Court, whose members hold almost absolutely unaccountable lifetime appointments and the power to overrule Congress and thus shape the actions of the administration. Without rigorous traditions and principles, they're a panel of philosopher-kings.
More so than in any other government position, it is possible for a Supreme Court justice to be wrong on the substance of an issue and right on the process, and even for the process to outweigh the substance if it means 10, 50, 100 future cases are handled better.
The HN timing is interesting what with the sci-hub story still being on the front page. It's in that very thread that there was intense (and quite correct) discussion on the difference between justice and law.
Texts, traditions and principles are references. Sometimes they're wrong. Also, as a non-american I find it absolutely absurd that for a lot of people there is this fascination with "the constitution" as being this all-powerful scripture and that's what the supreme court is supposed to defend, not the more abstract aspects of morality.
It's all nonsense of course - all supreme justices know exactly what kind of power they have, why they have it and how to use it ... and the constitution is really just a reference.
I remember reading some of Scalia's comments (I believe on marriage equality) explaining away how the supreme court should not "redefine" etc but as another poster said, it's easy to say that when convenient and forget it when even more convenient. Those comments could be applied to just about every single case...
> Also, as a non-american I find it absolutely absurd that for a lot of people there is this fascination with "the constitution" as being this all-powerful scripture and that's what the supreme court is supposed to defend, not the more abstract aspects of morality.
People have very large disagreements over what is morally right.
In the American system of government, it's the role of the legislature to ensure that the laws represent some consensus of justice and morality. It's the role of the judiciary to resolve ambiguity and contradiction in those laws. If the judiciary were to rule based on their subjective views of morality, it would subvert the will of the people, as expressed in laws and constitutional amendments passed by the legislature (and legislatures of the states).
The courts are courts of law instead of courts of morality or justice, largely due to interpretation of morality and justice being much more problematic and arbitrary than interpretation of laws. It's the role of the legislature, not the judiciary, to determine consensus views of justice and morality.
No no no. This thinking is sideways. The injustice of the removal of freedom from an innocent person trumps tradition.
The Founding Fathers et al so disliked the injustice of tradition they started a new country.
To your other point about being unaccountable, the Supreme Court is checked by the balance of power between the three branches as much as the other two are. They aren't all-powerful beings, and I've seen it around this discussion that they hold unmatched power - which just isn't true.
Guys like Scalia see the role of the justice system as systematically enforcing the laws as written. They believe that as they are unelected, they have no moral right to simply make things up as they go along, and thus that their work should be mechanical and predictable - even if it results in a suboptimal outcome.
Now, the implications of the above quote are pretty disturbing, at the same time, can I really disagree with it? I am not a constitutional scholar and don't know if it's accurate, but if the constitution really has nothing in that allows for a retrial if new evidence comes to light, that sounds like a bug in the constitution and would need to be fixed. If you skip that bit and ask judges to just do what makes sense to them instead of what's written, then the democratic process ends up being bypassed.
So even if someone disagrees with that point of view, I'd hope they can at least understand it.
The problem with that line of argument is that it is trivially hypocritical. As someone else has pointed out, the constitutional prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment" would have been sufficient grounds.
It is also more complexly hypocritical, as his opinions are constrained by the Constitution only as much as those of the other justices, which is to say only when convenient.
