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Excerpt from www.rawstory.com
The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority seems intent on strangling the life out of the Constitution to give Donald Trump authoritarian powers, according to a state Supreme Court justice.
Hawaii Supreme Court justice Todd Eddins has been an outspoken critic of the nation’s top court, which he said had abandoned legal precedent to impose their personal preferences and political theories to decide cases, and he told Slate columnists Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern that these decisions put democracy at risk.
“You know, when precedent is for suckers and we don’t know whether settled law will become unsettled every June, it’s really hard for the judiciary to function,” Eddins said. “It’s hard for judges to operate when there’s a lack of stability. And it’s not just judges; it’s the litigants, the lawyers, the law professors who have to tear up their syllabuses. I mean, it’s fundamental to our American system of justice that law works incrementally, that cases build upon cases, and that we rely on precedent. That’s the stability of the law. And when you have a group of people who come in and disregard precedent, it really unsettles things; it causes chaos. People don’t know how to operate.”