I just want to second something you said, and provide background on how good the choice of the issue was in a larger context.
(2) Let us buy glasses: We can’t buy glasses or contact lenses if our eye prescription is over 1-2 years old. This means that every 1-2 years, glasses-wearers need to pay $200 to optometrists for the slip of paper (and stinging eyeballs). Seems like it’s probably a racket and the benefit from detecting the odd eye cancer is outweighed by the costs, although see the debate here.
This seems highly reasonable to me, but then again I didn’t go to a very expensive school to get in on the relevant legalized monopoly.
There is this horrifying and/or hilarious quirk of US federal jurisprudence that when a judge applies a “rational basis test” in a court case, it means almost literally the opposite of what our community means by “rationality”. They mean it more like in the sense of “rationalization”.
When a law is obviously corrupt, and it is challenged for violating the guarantee of “equal protection under the law” (perhaps because the law obviously favors the corrupt cronies of the lawmakers at the expense of most normal people), modern US judges will not throw it out unless there are no conceivable rationalizations at all, ever, (even obviously low quality rationalizations) could ever hypothetically defend the law.
Basically, the rational basis test is a “cancerous gene” in our legal system at this point. Parts of the government are pretty clearly corrupt and then to prevent the rest of the country from defending itself against their predatory extraction of wealth using state power, the broken parts of the government seem to have invented the “rational basis test” as a valid legal doctrine.
Any time a law is challenged and that defense is the best possible defense of the law… it is good heuristic evidence (at least to me) that the law is terrible and should be deleted or fixed (or at least properly and coherently defended for its actual practical effects).
This loops back to your example! In 1955, in Williamson vs Lee Optical the lower courts threw out some particularly egregious optometry monopoly laws for violating due process and equal protection. Then the SCOTUS overturned this constitutional reasoning with the “any conceivable rationalization” test for overturning things.
If this jurisprudential oncogene didn’t exist, we already might not have this specific crazy law about optometry :-)
The rational(izable) basis test arose over time. Thesethreeposts are pretty good in showing how the general logic started out being used to allow laws in support of forced sterilization (when eugenics was popular), then to defend segregation (when that was popular), and in the 1930s to defend price fixing (when that was popular). Two of the posts mention the optometry case specifically!
The judiciary is not the maker of law. And the level of scrutinity varies. If all laws required “strict scutinity” then the law maker would be quite impotent. In this kind of setting passing laws would be pointless as people would just rely on connections to basic rights on what official acts actually are left standing (a kind of common law scheme). If you have lost representation in the law maker and don’t like its doing, declaring it “corrupt” is not a valid way to circumvent it.
A jury has wide latitude to find the facts of a single case. In order to overturn a jury finding you need to establish that “no reasonable jury” could have took that finding. In similar way the law makers have wide latitude to make law and challenging that means establishing that “no resonable assembly” could pass that. There are limits to what can be passed but the primary way to hash out minor disagremeents is deliberation and voting in the law maker body. It is not proper for judges to deliberate the laws themselfs for the law makers. The check and balance is to catch and prevent what is outside their latitude. If we had too particular standards for juries there would be no real latitude for them to determine guilt but it would be mechanistically restricted by law and “jury of peers” would lose significance and then why have the jury assembled at all. In the same way the law maker needs to have some real latitude in balancing what rights and goods are desired.
I just want to second something you said, and provide background on how good the choice of the issue was in a larger context.
This seems highly reasonable to me, but then again I didn’t go to a very expensive school to get in on the relevant legalized monopoly.
There is this horrifying and/or hilarious quirk of US federal jurisprudence that when a judge applies a “rational basis test” in a court case, it means almost literally the opposite of what our community means by “rationality”. They mean it more like in the sense of “rationalization”.
When a law is obviously corrupt, and it is challenged for violating the guarantee of “equal protection under the law” (perhaps because the law obviously favors the corrupt cronies of the lawmakers at the expense of most normal people), modern US judges will not throw it out unless there are no conceivable rationalizations at all, ever, (even obviously low quality rationalizations) could ever hypothetically defend the law.
Basically, the rational basis test is a “cancerous gene” in our legal system at this point. Parts of the government are pretty clearly corrupt and then to prevent the rest of the country from defending itself against their predatory extraction of wealth using state power, the broken parts of the government seem to have invented the “rational basis test” as a valid legal doctrine.
Any time a law is challenged and that defense is the best possible defense of the law… it is good heuristic evidence (at least to me) that the law is terrible and should be deleted or fixed (or at least properly and coherently defended for its actual practical effects).
This loops back to your example! In 1955, in Williamson vs Lee Optical the lower courts threw out some particularly egregious optometry monopoly laws for violating due process and equal protection. Then the SCOTUS overturned this constitutional reasoning with the “any conceivable rationalization” test for overturning things.
If this jurisprudential oncogene didn’t exist, we already might not have this specific crazy law about optometry :-)
The rational(izable) basis test arose over time. These three posts are pretty good in showing how the general logic started out being used to allow laws in support of forced sterilization (when eugenics was popular), then to defend segregation (when that was popular), and in the 1930s to defend price fixing (when that was popular). Two of the posts mention the optometry case specifically!
The judiciary is not the maker of law. And the level of scrutinity varies. If all laws required “strict scutinity” then the law maker would be quite impotent. In this kind of setting passing laws would be pointless as people would just rely on connections to basic rights on what official acts actually are left standing (a kind of common law scheme). If you have lost representation in the law maker and don’t like its doing, declaring it “corrupt” is not a valid way to circumvent it.
A jury has wide latitude to find the facts of a single case. In order to overturn a jury finding you need to establish that “no reasonable jury” could have took that finding. In similar way the law makers have wide latitude to make law and challenging that means establishing that “no resonable assembly” could pass that. There are limits to what can be passed but the primary way to hash out minor disagremeents is deliberation and voting in the law maker body. It is not proper for judges to deliberate the laws themselfs for the law makers. The check and balance is to catch and prevent what is outside their latitude. If we had too particular standards for juries there would be no real latitude for them to determine guilt but it would be mechanistically restricted by law and “jury of peers” would lose significance and then why have the jury assembled at all. In the same way the law maker needs to have some real latitude in balancing what rights and goods are desired.