While appropriate to an examination of possible downsides to the notion of "legislative damages," the speculation about lawyers' motives highlights a more general difficulty facing legislators, especially those tasked with trying to anticipate constitutional pitfalls. Numerous dictatorships thrive under constitutions that, on their face, are liberal, democratic, and bulwarks of freedom for citizens; and even in democracies themselves, encroachments on citizens' rights are endemic. Sometimes these encroachments are resisted in court, but the number of people who decide that challenging City Hall--or corporations, or 'elites'--legally is beyond their means, or otherwise just not worth it, must be many to one. The truth is that humankind has never succeeded in devising a political, economic or legal system that can't be gamed by somebody--and the fault clearly lies less with the framers of legislation than with unscrupulous actors.
If every citizen were an Enlightenment philosopher and ethically conscientious, there are many constitutions and systems of rules that could be made to work as their creators envisioned. As it is, we end up with systems that are 'broken' even when framers have done their job flawlessly. Aldous Huxley said back in the 1930s that we would gain little from reforming society's systems and institutions until we first reformed ourselves, and nothing has happened in the intervening decades to suggest he was wrong. I'm not saying we shouldn't strive to make our fundamental laws and systems of governance as fair and farsighted as possible, just that this will grant us no magical immunity from our own deficiencies of character and intellect.
Gotta say I am more convinced by this argument than the original. I think the least worst remedy for bad lawmakers is political, not judicial. Vote the bums out. And if they don't, well as H.L said, "the people have spoken for what they want and it's time to give it to them good and hard"
While appropriate to an examination of possible downsides to the notion of "legislative damages," the speculation about lawyers' motives highlights a more general difficulty facing legislators, especially those tasked with trying to anticipate constitutional pitfalls. Numerous dictatorships thrive under constitutions that, on their face, are liberal, democratic, and bulwarks of freedom for citizens; and even in democracies themselves, encroachments on citizens' rights are endemic. Sometimes these encroachments are resisted in court, but the number of people who decide that challenging City Hall--or corporations, or 'elites'--legally is beyond their means, or otherwise just not worth it, must be many to one. The truth is that humankind has never succeeded in devising a political, economic or legal system that can't be gamed by somebody--and the fault clearly lies less with the framers of legislation than with unscrupulous actors.
If every citizen were an Enlightenment philosopher and ethically conscientious, there are many constitutions and systems of rules that could be made to work as their creators envisioned. As it is, we end up with systems that are 'broken' even when framers have done their job flawlessly. Aldous Huxley said back in the 1930s that we would gain little from reforming society's systems and institutions until we first reformed ourselves, and nothing has happened in the intervening decades to suggest he was wrong. I'm not saying we shouldn't strive to make our fundamental laws and systems of governance as fair and farsighted as possible, just that this will grant us no magical immunity from our own deficiencies of character and intellect.
Gotta say I am more convinced by this argument than the original. I think the least worst remedy for bad lawmakers is political, not judicial. Vote the bums out. And if they don't, well as H.L said, "the people have spoken for what they want and it's time to give it to them good and hard"