Fact-free constitutional adjudication is abetted by constitutional lawyers (prominently including professors of constitutional law), who “know little about their proper subject matter— a complex of political, social, and economic phenomena. They know only cases. An exclusive diet of Supreme Court opinions is a recipe for intellectual malnutrition.”Writes Judge Posner in "Reflections on Judging" (quoting himself in an earlier book). Here's his footnote summarizing the mess in the case law:
See, for example, Utah Highway Patrol Ass’n v. American Atheists, Inc., 132 S. Ct. 12 (2011) (dissent from denial of certiorari) (“Establishment Clause jurisprudence [is] in shambles,” “nebulous,” “erratic,” “no principled basis,” “Establishment Clause purgatory,” “impenetrable,” “ad hoc patchwork,” “limbo,” “incapable of consistent application,” “our mess,” “little more than intuition and a tape measure”); Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384, 398– 99 (1993) (concurring opinion) (a “geometry of crooked lines and wavering shapes,” a “ghoul in a late-night horror movie” that can’t be slain even though “no fewer than five of the currently sitting Justices have, in their own opinions, personally driven pencils through the creature’s heart”).I'd have given credit to the Justices responsible for those vivid words — Thomas and Scalia, respectively.
AND: By the way, quoting Scalia and Thomas doesn't very well support the proposition that no one is satisfied (though the proposition is probably true or close to true).
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