Well, the theory says that the judge can only apply the current law as is written. And as written his interpretation is that the FDA has regulatory jurisdiction (and therefore obligation) over E-Cigarettes. But the judge doesn't create the law. If Congress wants to change the law they can. There is nothing legally that prevents Congress from passing a law that specifically exempts E-Cigarettes from FDA approval. I am not saying that politically this is feasible - the point is only that one judge is not the only party capable of making a decision.

You can "fix" a memory-blowup bug by just auto-restarting the server when the memory usage hits a threshold. It temporarily alleviates the problem, but it doesn't actually fix the bug. The bug is still there, and will happen again and the server will have to be restarted again, ad infinitum. The only way to solve the issue is to find out what code is not releasing memory properly.

One judge can interpret law-v1 on a whim, thereby affecting millions of people, and the only way to "fix" the bug is to get Congress to update the law to v2, which potentially takes years, which is going to leave an entire generation screwed for that time. That still doesn't solve the problem because some judge will eventually interpret law-v2 in a shifty way and this will lead to law-v3, ad infinitum. It's a bug, not a feature.

Laws are closer to guidelines. The real power seems to reside with judges who get to decide the realized consequences of violating a law, and in many cases, the nuances of what causes a law to be violated. At the end of the day, a person's life can sometimes be affected because of a decision made by a single judge.

I think that their critique of the overall judicial system was a tangential aside and didn't - directly - apply to this specific situation.

Admittedly, I could be wrong here but that was my take-away from the OC.