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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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In the American legal system, judges have traditionally held that certain domains are non-justiciable—outside judical power to review. Military operations and prosecutorial discretion were mentioned here because those are two such traditional domains. So no—the traditional judicial response to suits about a military operation is to say "sorry, my hands are tied, it's categorically outside my judicial authority to be involved" and dismiss the suit.

You can argue that it shouldn't be this way, that judges shouldn't categorically exclude themselves from certain domains. There's a reasonable argument for that! But that shift, if it happens, would be a departure from traditional legal norms. And one judge doing so on his own can certainly be criticized as being at odds with the existing limits on judicial power as has been hitherto understood by the judiciary.

I'm not weighing in on the object level question of if the specific question in this particular suit should have been ruled as non-justiciable. It very plausibly is analogous to traditionally non-justiciable domains (like military operations.) But it's hardly cut and dried the way a suit about a military operation would be. There's precedent to be made here by higher courts in the future.

My point here is on the meta-level, that the US legal system recognizes some domains as categorically non-justiciable, and that this is why military operatorations and prosecutorial discretion were invoked as examples.

Fair enough. I was actually unaware of that, so thank you for the correction.