The constitutional design of our government assumes that legislatures are far better fact-finding bodies than courts are. This is the core of the rational basi

The constitutional design of our government assumes that legislatures are far better fact-finding bodies than courts are. This is the core of the rational basis test. As long as the court can find some remotely rational basis for a law to exist, broad deference is given to the legislature. For example, if the legislature cites a study showing that vaccines cause autism and therefore should be banned, it's not the job of the court to assess the methodology of the study. In contrast, if the sole justification one could come up with is a non-sequitur ("lets ban vaccines because then the wind might blow and break some windows"), a law would fail the rational basis test. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_basis_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_basis_review See also "footnote four", which is one of those weird bits of supreme court lore that is nearly a constitutional amendment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Carolene_Products_Co.#Footnote_Four http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Carolene_Produ...