I hate this meme. This is explicitly not true in the American legal system, as well as similar systems evolved from the British one.
Case law is just as much part of the law as statutes are.
This is the fundamental difference between common law systems and civil law systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#Common_law_legal_sy...
It is, in fact, a self-replicating unit of behavior.
(It's also true in one sense, which is one of the bases of it's relative reproductive fitness as a meme.)
No, beliefs—whether true and justified (hence, knowledge) or otherwise—are not memes. Behaviors—including ones by which beliefs (including knowledge) are transmitted—are memes. If memes are viewed as analogous to genes (which is the whole point of the concept), beliefs (again, including knowledge) are among the features analogous to aspects of phenotype.
There are some exceptions to this where federal laws have likely overreached the framers intentions, and then federal courts had to rule on a matter pertaining to that law.
Uh, no. This is just completely incorrect. Things like reasonable suspicion are standards created by federal courts that have the force of law (see Terry v Ohio). The logic is based on the 4th amendment, but the standard was created by the justices.
District courts can't really create laws since it's not binding on any other court. Appeals courts do all the time, in fact one of the easiest ways to get something to the supreme court is to have a split between the circuits because that creates different law in different parts of the country.
Federal courts aren't limited to ruling on Constitutional issues—cases that are purely state law can be in federal court jurisdiction, e.g., because of diversity of citizenship of the parties, and any federal law issue, not just an issue of the Constitution, also qualifies a case for federal court; and they create law just like any other courts (only with broader geographical impact, because it's federal law.)
Overruling the Supreme Court requires a constitutional amendment and this won't happen, and the court rarely does something untenable or an impossible outcome for a functioning society as it wants compliance. It tries to match a partial collective conscious understanding of a topic.
When it does act as fill-in legislature, Congress/Legislatures are capable of simply changing the law it ruled on, such as repealing the legal framework supporting enforcement agency.
The courts can also overrule itself in a future court case.
(The Supreme Court exists by the constitution, the other federal courts are created by congress and have a path to the supreme court.)
Maybe there is some important lesson about people here. I think today people think of themselves as above those of the past who took intellectual shortcuts to understanding the world and came to preposterous models of reality. But then you can see just how intellectually lazy people are still today, yet at the same time how hard it is to convince them.
For example a constant back and forth switching on some rule such that the black person goes to prison while the white person walks free would constantly choke the system for democratic consultations until the populace collectively decides to let the black person drink from the same fountain as the white person (or whatever). The system should be set up such that whenever rules are applied unequally it slightly chokes the system with another democratic consultation, until humans end up with equality before the law.
EDIT: I dont say this to be snarky. On the contrary, the idea of "law's being applied equally" being enforced by citizens exercising their powers democratically, vs. the whims of one judge, is really appealing, and explains a lot of why we supposedly have things like jury trials being a right for all.
It's just unfortunate that the reality is, we are trying to do this, but if you look at folks who are actually trying to highlight things like discrimination in the system or "hey, maybe we arent applying these laws equally"...well the response they get for doing that isn't always what one would hope for from an enlightened body of citizens.
Currently it is the status quo that is choking the news, which is not what I propose...
I don't read snark in your comment btw... I value your contribution
It's like alphabetization, typically after introduction of one person one vote, people become alphabetic, because by the point the populace has made it clear elitism on this facet (voting) is over, the status quo has every incentive to at least educate the populace in reading and writing...
Similarily, I expect moves toward direct democracy (by popular force) to change the behaviour of the elites and the status quo such that "the brutes who will now unavoidably rule us, should at least enjoy a higher level of education with regards to law and so on", and asking questions about law, finding answers, navigating the law, ... will become standard course curricula for the bulk of the populace in high school...
They set the interpretation of the law, which could literally go any which way, and is not reversible without further legislative action to repeal/amend the law. So in a way, they most definitely set law by solidifying its 'meaning'.
Case law is very much law. Judges are not supposed to invent law from whole cloth, sure, but they are supposed to make law in a very specific and important sense: by interpreting law (including constitutional law) when its meaning isn't clear. The fact that some judges abuse this to set policy does not mean that judges shouldn't make law -- it only means that some judges don't have the right stuff to be judges. But judge-made law is a thing, and a real and legitimate thing. Downvoting this won't make it not so. Please acquaint yourselves with English and American jurisprudence, law, and constitutions.
The parallel in programming would be some god class that handles every exception, vs handling exceptions as close to the exception as possible. Generally global exception handling is a bad idea, you want to handle exceptions as close to the context as possible since that is where the most pertinent information in the system lives, and also has the least impact on the rest of the system if the exception can be resolved at a local level.