5 ms·

This is so incredibly ignorant, which is fine. We're on a startup forum after all--not a conlaw round table. We aren't supposed to be experts. But to think you

by kolbe 2y ago

This is so incredibly ignorant, which is fine. We're on a startup forum after all--not a conlaw round table. We aren't supposed to be experts. But to think you have some superior intellectual standing on this issue compared to any of the SCOTUS justices to too much Dunning-Kruger for me to just let slide.

underlipton 2y ago
The most recent two have no business being on the bench in the first place, so maybe not so much.
- kolbe 2y ago
  ACB and Jackson? I am about as well-versed in the law as any non-lawyer, and I have 10% at best of the legal knowledge of either of them. The hubris on legal matters of some of the people here is laughable. It's the equivalent of some random law student criticizing John Carmack.
  - arwineap 2y ago
    I assume that they were not talking about Jackson. McConnell blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland for 293 days arguing that there was not enough time before the election. Then, somehow, they turned around and passed through Amy Coney Barrett in 35 days, instead of following the same precedent of waiting for the election. The hypocrisy is blatant and disgusting.
    - kolbe 2y ago
      The fact that you think this is hypocrisy, and are willing to voice that "opinion" (i.e. regurgitating what some news outlet told you) with such assuredness within this community using such passionate and extreme language is why I find some of the pretentiousness on here to be so bad that I just have to laugh at it. If you are actually a programmer, figuring you why Garland wasn't a precedent for ACB wouldn't be hard. You just conveniently left out an 'if' statement in your analysis
      - arwineap 2y ago
        Garland was nominated in March 2016 Amy was nominated September 2020 Go ahead and inform the class why we didn't have enough time for the appointment in March but did in September.
        kolbe 2y ago
        "not enough time" LOL. It's like taking someone seriously who wants to build my web stack on fortran.
        arwineap 2y ago
        The fact that you cannot defend McConnell's position is telling.
        kolbe 2y ago
        You're smart. Here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nominations_to_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nominations_to_the_Sup... Notice that whenever there was an A1-A2 party split, especially when a nomination was approaching an election, either the nomination failed, or it didn't succeed until the lame duck (if the president's party won re-election). The exceptions require some better historical knowledge. For example, Democrats approved Anthony Kennedy (the most liberal justice a modern republican has ever nominated) in late 1987, but only after they had blocked Robert Bork. The historical precedent for compromise was even in the data: when it was successful, the votes were XX-0 The real failure here was on the part of Obama, who refused to budge at all with the political lean of his nominee. He looked at the polls, saw that Hillary was slated to crush someone who was essentially running as a joke, and thought "I don't need find a bipartisan compromise, Hill will just fill this in January." But even when it's not close to an election year, look at the Nixon years. Democrats blocking everything until they got nominees they truly approved of. I'm sorry Obama had such hubris as to think Dems were a lock for 2016 that he didn't have to compromise, but he rolled the dice and lost. Sorry. That doesn't make it illegitimate. It makes it the same exact political situation that has always existed.
paulryanrogers 2y ago
Appeal to authority?
- kolbe 2y ago
  Yes. We do it all the time. And at the margins, sure, it's unfair. But when a random poster using sophomoric logic is going on some pretentious rant about knowing more than Neil Gorsuch, all you need to do is note that one person has spent tens of thousands of hours being aided by the finest educational paths to the job of SCOTUS justice, and one is a professional spamer
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Let's judge the ideas/rulings for ourselves, after all we often vote for judges or those who appoint them. Law isn't rocket science. If it's impenetrable to normal people then that also is a problem worth solving.
wwweston 2y ago
While argument from authority does make sense in a social/political context which functionally defines correctness in terms of authority of appointed office, I'm sure it wouldn't be lost on any seasoned lawyer that it still constitutes a fallacy when it comes to the merits of the argument alone. Similarly no one would know better than a lawyer the distinction between the authority of an opinion and its merits -- or to get less meta and back closer to the specifics of the opinion and surrounding arguments, the fact that multiple arguments can be reasonable and multiple policies might well be not only a side effect but the expected and even perhaps desired outcome of public processes from court decisions (this one obviously different from the one it overturns) to elections. And part of the point of institutions like courts is that the reasoning is subject to public review and discourse, both institutional and social. I'm making a specific response to shortcomings apparent in the argument -- the opinion seems to treat the fact of differing interpretation of law or differing policy goals between different executive administrations to be some kind of bug or worse a surprise, when it seems entirely reasonable to expect it as a feature, one that certainly shouldn't be surprising to someone whose whole career (and indeed, features of this very decision) turns on the interpretive range often present within the law. If you have specific commentary indicating how experts from a conlaw round table might engage this response, by all means, don't "just let slide", enlighten all of us in the course of doing the work that people genuinely combating Dunning-Kruger might do by elaborating on what, specifically, is overlooked in the response or missing from its counterargument.
- kolbe 2y ago
  Insofar as you think you were responding to what you identified (and then conveniently changed to fit your narrative) to be his arguments, I would say it's not hard to see the difference between a law changing every 4-8 years versus once every 40+ years (combined with about 5 years of foreshadowing the changes). You also conveniently run with the "fill in the gaps" narrative, by belittling the scope and impact of these gaps. Trillions have been spent in these gaps. Thousands if not millions of lives have ended due to choices in these gaps. Families torn apart. Suicides. Bankruptcies. So, for "specific commentary", me, a regular dude, can see straight through them. If you wanted a real, deep Roberts-quality response, you're in the wrong place. None of what you said was even presented in oral arguments, because two of the finest lawyers in the world could also see through that pretentious fallacy filled drivel, and knew that the 9 justices, all of whom are also leagues ahead of you or I in legal knowledge and skill, would equally scoff.

by kolbe 2y ago

underlipton 2y ago

The most recent two have no business being on the bench in the first place, so maybe not so much.

kolbe 2y ago
ACB and Jackson? I am about as well-versed in the law as any non-lawyer, and I have 10% at best of the legal knowledge of either of them. The hubris on legal matters of some of the people here is laughable. It's the equivalent of some random law student criticizing John Carmack.
- arwineap 2y ago
  I assume that they were not talking about Jackson. McConnell blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland for 293 days arguing that there was not enough time before the election. Then, somehow, they turned around and passed through Amy Coney Barrett in 35 days, instead of following the same precedent of waiting for the election. The hypocrisy is blatant and disgusting.
  - kolbe 2y ago
    The fact that you think this is hypocrisy, and are willing to voice that "opinion" (i.e. regurgitating what some news outlet told you) with such assuredness within this community using such passionate and extreme language is why I find some of the pretentiousness on here to be so bad that I just have to laugh at it. If you are actually a programmer, figuring you why Garland wasn't a precedent for ACB wouldn't be hard. You just conveniently left out an 'if' statement in your analysis
    - arwineap 2y ago
      Garland was nominated in March 2016 Amy was nominated September 2020 Go ahead and inform the class why we didn't have enough time for the appointment in March but did in September.
      - kolbe 2y ago
        "not enough time" LOL. It's like taking someone seriously who wants to build my web stack on fortran.
        arwineap 2y ago
        The fact that you cannot defend McConnell's position is telling.
        kolbe 2y ago
        You're smart. Here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nominations_to_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nominations_to_the_Sup... Notice that whenever there was an A1-A2 party split, especially when a nomination was approaching an election, either the nomination failed, or it didn't succeed until the lame duck (if the president's party won re-election). The exceptions require some better historical knowledge. For example, Democrats approved Anthony Kennedy (the most liberal justice a modern republican has ever nominated) in late 1987, but only after they had blocked Robert Bork. The historical precedent for compromise was even in the data: when it was successful, the votes were XX-0 The real failure here was on the part of Obama, who refused to budge at all with the political lean of his nominee. He looked at the polls, saw that Hillary was slated to crush someone who was essentially running as a joke, and thought "I don't need find a bipartisan compromise, Hill will just fill this in January." But even when it's not close to an election year, look at the Nixon years. Democrats blocking everything until they got nominees they truly approved of. I'm sorry Obama had such hubris as to think Dems were a lock for 2016 that he didn't have to compromise, but he rolled the dice and lost. Sorry. That doesn't make it illegitimate. It makes it the same exact political situation that has always existed.

paulryanrogers 2y ago

Appeal to authority?

kolbe 2y ago
Yes. We do it all the time. And at the margins, sure, it's unfair. But when a random poster using sophomoric logic is going on some pretentious rant about knowing more than Neil Gorsuch, all you need to do is note that one person has spent tens of thousands of hours being aided by the finest educational paths to the job of SCOTUS justice, and one is a professional spamer
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Let's judge the ideas/rulings for ourselves, after all we often vote for judges or those who appoint them. Law isn't rocket science. If it's impenetrable to normal people then that also is a problem worth solving.

wwweston 2y ago

While argument from authority does make sense in a social/political context which functionally defines correctness in terms of authority of appointed office, I'm sure it wouldn't be lost on any seasoned lawyer that it still constitutes a fallacy when it comes to the merits of the argument alone. Similarly no one would know better than a lawyer the distinction between the authority of an opinion and its merits -- or to get less meta and back closer to the specifics of the opinion and surrounding arguments, the fact that multiple arguments can be reasonable and multiple policies might well be not only a side effect but the expected and even perhaps desired outcome of public processes from court decisions (this one obviously different from the one it overturns) to elections. And part of the point of institutions like courts is that the reasoning is subject to public review and discourse, both institutional and social. I'm making a specific response to shortcomings apparent in the argument -- the opinion seems to treat the fact of differing interpretation of law or differing policy goals between different executive administrations to be some kind of bug or worse a surprise, when it seems entirely reasonable to expect it as a feature, one that certainly shouldn't be surprising to someone whose whole career (and indeed, features of this very decision) turns on the interpretive range often present within the law. If you have specific commentary indicating how experts from a conlaw round table might engage this response, by all means, don't "just let slide", enlighten all of us in the course of doing the work that people genuinely combating Dunning-Kruger might do by elaborating on what, specifically, is overlooked in the response or missing from its counterargument.

kolbe 2y ago
Insofar as you think you were responding to what you identified (and then conveniently changed to fit your narrative) to be his arguments, I would say it's not hard to see the difference between a law changing every 4-8 years versus once every 40+ years (combined with about 5 years of foreshadowing the changes). You also conveniently run with the "fill in the gaps" narrative, by belittling the scope and impact of these gaps. Trillions have been spent in these gaps. Thousands if not millions of lives have ended due to choices in these gaps. Families torn apart. Suicides. Bankruptcies. So, for "specific commentary", me, a regular dude, can see straight through them. If you wanted a real, deep Roberts-quality response, you're in the wrong place. None of what you said was even presented in oral arguments, because two of the finest lawyers in the world could also see through that pretentious fallacy filled drivel, and knew that the 9 justices, all of whom are also leagues ahead of you or I in legal knowledge and skill, would equally scoff.