597
Clarence Thomas’s $267,230 R.V. and the Friend Who Financed It
(www.nytimes.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
597 points (97.6% liked)
News
23311 readers
3439 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
None of the federalist society "judges" deserve to be on the court, but here we are...
Can confirm, they are laughed at in law schools. They clique up. None of the actual smart kids like them. The smartest federalist society members are just smart enough to be dangerous. Mostly religious types. Not very diverse.
They basically believe that the law can only be understood in the original sense that it was written in, yes? Instead of the law being living it is dead.
Very basically, yes.
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what a dictionary is, a snapshot of a language in time. The meaning of words change over time. "Nice" used to mean stupid in English.
They believe they can divine the intentions of the dead, that they hear the voices of dead people, and can know what they mean.
They also believe that from the writings of a collective, enacted in the form of statutes, they can discern a single, unified intention. This is of course completely ridiculous, but to hear them tell it, they figured out a way to interpret law "objectively," which is also of course ridiculous.
I'm sure they are nice people.
I am pleased with what you accomplished today
Thanks. I know very little about this stuff. My understanding is that there is an order to understand the law. Canons of construction, right? So wouldn't that mean that the intent behind the law can only be invoked if the text as written is open to multiple understanding? If that is the case how can they invoke that if the text can never be ambiguous?
If the text must only be looked at exactly as written you can't claim it could be ambiguous. If you can't claim it is ambiguous then you can't worry about what they really meant to say. Guess I am lost. It seems like they are arguing for a method that if fully applied would mean the method can't be applied.
What mistake am I making? Also thanks again.
You're looking for logical consistency where there isn't any. It's all made up.
There is no one right or wrong way to interpret law. For every canon of statutory construction, there is an equal and opposite canon. My textbook called them thrusts and parries.
Conservatives believe in a plain meaning approach: follow the literal text no matter what because the cold hard text is the best evidence of the legislative intent. If the result is obviously absurd and offensive to justice, too bad, it's the legislature's job to fix the statute, not the court's. Conservatives hate they idea of any power to do affirmative justice resting with the courts, they want it in Congress where their rich benefactors and buy congresspersons.
The problem with that is that legislatures are messy and words are imprecise. The words represent individual understandings and compromises of single members and caucuses, not the whole body. Even when Conservatives say they are following the original text / plain meaning, they are still doing subjective interpretation, just without admitting it.
Purposivism is the idea that statutes should be interpreted and applied by courts with reference to the purpose of the law and common sense.
But a constitution is not a dictionary. It is designed to restrict the current majority, if the majority redefines what the words in the constitution mean it is no restriction.
What about Scalia?
What about him?
It's one thing to disagree politically, it's another to take bribes and lie about it or cover it up.