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It’s crazy to me how one judge gets to decide the fate of a 100 billion dollar merger. Humans are fallible.
by gzu 8y ago
It’s crazy to me how one judge gets to decide the fate of a 100 billion dollar merger. Humans are fallible.
- atmosx 8y agoAre you proposing to use AI (or what we call AI nowadays) instead? :-)
- 1137 8y ago// super advanced AI for court decision while (defendant.getSumOfContrib(partyInCharge)<= Gov.Judicial.Common.RULE_FAVOR_MINIMUM) { delay(); }
- TillE 8y agoI think it would not necessarily be insane to envision a system which hands off non-obvious regulatory cases to the legislature, to amend the law such that this and future cases could be trivially decided.
- atmosx 8y agoOnly an engineer could entertain this idea.
- aurailious 8y agoWell, the judge has to base the decision on a whole bunch of laws. It's not like judges get to decide this on their own.
- hermitdev 8y agoExcept when they do. Activist judges & judicial legislation [0] are not a new thing. [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/judicial%20legislation https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/judicial%20legisl...
- forapurpose 8y ago'Activist judge' is indeed a term in the English language, but what does it have to do with this case? There are 'drunk airplane pilots', but does that make the pilot of the plane I'm going to board a suspect?
- komali2 8y agoI think of it in an engineery sense - if the edge case is possible, it will happen. Maybe that works for software engineering, where it's a good idea to pause a release in case someone uses scripts to send a shitload of bad requests to our API and crashes a server because of our bug or whatever, but I understand that that doesn't work 1:1 with the real world, where it doesn't make sense to not have the aviation industry until we perfect self-flying planes.
- bmelton 8y ago> if the edge case is possible, it will happen By that argument, you will: * beat your wife * murder an enemy * shoot up a school full of children * commit arson * jump bail * evade arrest * die in a hail of bullets So, assuming all those eventualities, why shouldn't we just put you to death now? To spare you the rhetorical exercise, the answer is because we don't punish you for the things you might do, but only punish you for a) the things that you have done, b) that we can prove, c) beyond a reasonable doubt, d) in a court of law, e) before a jury of your peers.
- dEnigma 8y agoI think we're getting a little sidetracked here. What the grandparent wanted to say was just that the corset of laws that binds a judge might not be as tight as you think; hence e.g. activist judges.
- bmelton 8y agoI think my point stands, which is that not every possibility is an eventuality, and we shouldn't assume that to be true without a willingness to accept a very bad panoply of preventative measures masquerading as corrective measures. That said, whether or not an activist judge allows a presumptively lawful merger to occur is hardly a hill worth dying on. We have remedies for activist judges through an appeal process. Where an appeals process is not available after the merger, we have remedy for anti-competitive companies through regulatory influence, regulatory agency, rule of law, and a court system to back that up.
- xenihn 8y ago>Well, the judge has to base the decision on a whole bunch of laws. It's not like judges get to decide this on their own. This is a weird opinion to hold when you take the fact that two judges can come to two completely separate conclusions on a single issue, while drawing from the same laws.
- blind_boy_grunt 8y agoJudging is the act of applying law (general) to a particular case (specific). Since laws can't anticipate every future situation at their time of writing, no matter what there will _always_ be some disconnect between these two -- i.e. vagueness/generality in law, leading to edge cases. Which is why two judges can come to two completely separate conclusions on a single issue, while drawing from the same laws, based on their own personal methods of interpretation and biases.
- mortdeus 8y agoJudges in the lower circuits are also held accountable to higher circuit judges if they don't interpret the law while taking past case judgement into consideration. A lower district judge can't overrule a higher judge's opinions.
- kuraudo 8y agoIn a perfect world, what you said would be how things are actually decided.
- flubert 8y agoYou may enjoy: "The Myth of the Rule of Law". http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
- maxk42 8y agoApparently you've never heard of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_immunity
- forapurpose 8y agoJudges are subject to many checks on their power. First, they only can rule on cases brought before their court, which requires two other parties to want a trial (including, in this case, the Justice Department). Also, unless they are in the Supreme Court, judges generally do not choose which cases they hear. Finally, and most significantly, they also are restricted by laws made by the legislature, precedent made by other judges and higher courts, the facts, juries (if the litigants wish to use them), principles of law, and appeals.
- oh_sigh 8y agoAnd the judge didn't even fully understand the arguments of the DOJ, and claimed it was too hot and too late to try to understand them.