My perspective(s) on the rightness of judicial decisions

Hmm, with regards to Jesse's statement, "Karl mentioned his dislike for the term 'legislating from the bench'; that is, he thought it exaggerated or inappropriate or overused or...", I'm glad someone's managed to clearly explain what I mean :)

It dawned on me that I never responded to Jesse's question, so I suppose I should.

The relativist in me says no, the Supreme Court cannot wrongly decide a case, because, legally speaking, right and wrong changes as society changes, and we, via our constitution, have entrusted them to be the ultimate authorities as to what is right or wrong in our society.

I suppose they could actually make a technical legal error independent from any interpretation of "right" or "wrong." But that's not going to happen too often with how rigourously their decisions are reviewed, and besides I don't think that's what the question was getting at.

From an absolute moral standpoint, yes they can make a "wrong" decision. But seeing as there's only one person I trust on absolute morals (and it's not me), I don't think it does a lot of good for us, as a society, to classify decisions as right/wrong from an absolute moral standpoint. Besides, the court is not intended to be an authority on absolute morality.

Now, another option is would be to say that the Court's rightness depends on how well it substitutes as a proxy for the prevailing social attitudes in the current historical context. But what if they make a decision that runs counter to prevailing social attitudes? Is that wrong? Again, such a classification is not very useful because it requires that one can capture, at any time, the exact social attitudes of the nation. But, even if one could do that, I don't particulalry favor this perspective because in the past they've made decisions that I'm fairly certain ran counter to then-prevailing social attitiudes, but that would today be considered "right."

Here's yet another perspective on it... One of the best aspects of our American system is that we have a judiciary to keep government in check. Unfortunately, we have to rely on humans to serve the function of the judiciary, and so we inevitably are going to disagree with our judiciary some of the time. However, to preserve the integrity of the system, we must operate under the assumption that the Court produces "right" results. When they produce results with which we disagree, we can work within the system to change the law and/or social sentiment, thereby creating different results. But until the law is changed, the Court's decision is still "right." In fact, by acting in compliance with the result, impute "rightness" to the result.

Not quite sure where I'm going with these different perspectives, other than to say that, from a legal perspective, I do not believe that the Court is likely to ever be "wrong" within the current historical moment. Barring technical errors, the only time a decision may ever be classified as legally wrong is when a decision is later overturned by the Court itself.

From my personal perspective, the Court can reach decisions that yield "wrong" results--i.e. results to which I am opposed. But I would be very reluctant to say that a still-standing decision was itself "wrong" or "incorrect."