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How so? Every so often the foundations of common law get to be re-evaluated which could be disastrous. But in practice it's likely the foundations would be sim
by musingsole 5y ago
How so?
Every so often the foundations of common law get to be re-evaluated which could be disastrous. But in practice it's likely the foundations would be similar cycle to cycle. Further, to the degree that the roots of rulings change due to a new constitution, don't those ruling trees need to change? The constitution changing is a signal that the people, their needs and their values have changed and so should all rulings based on those ideas.
--As an aside, I'm biased against common law. I appreciate my ancestors but I question accepting all of their prior decisions as taken until proven otherwise.
- mindslight 5y agoFor the same reason that you can't just make changes to a codebase without understanding its structure. Rewriting the Constitution also means throwing away 200 years of Supreme Court decisions. It's easy to envision invaliding precedents that rely on things that have changed, but the process of creating those precedents takes so long nobody really knows what the new law means until it's tested. Furthermore, the arguments to invalidate them are also going to be in the form of more legal arguments, so you're adding another whole dimension to the problem. Given how opaque the law is to the average person right now, I'd say we're already at the limit. FWIW I'm biased against common law too, because it seems to take what is actually policy and brand it as if it were universal truth.