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I've mixed feelings. To some extent, these are adaptations to outside circumstances: the specific combination of requiring standing while allowing settlement means that just waiting outside of a courthouse for a person leaves too much risk of the clearest violations never percolating up to the appeals level, media has made it more important to have photogenic defendants, and selective enforcement can make finding anyone with standing hard even for cases where people are in wide fear of the law.
On the other hand, it's not hard to notice the places it hasn't adapted. Both areas like death penalty cases where you don't really get to pick your fighter (and, correspondingly, get increasingly reaching characterizations), those where the difficultly of finding a Goldilocks-Just-Right case kicks the can down the road for years or decades, or those where the test case was selected by opponents of the defendant, to undermine the rule of law.
I dunno. I'd rather have a system where rather than standing we had a genuine lawyer-on-lawyer position where a law could be debated from legal principles without someone's freedom or livelihood playing the ante to the case, but I don't know the possible downsides and I do know there's little if any interest for the state to support such a system (outside of a limited free speech and, until last year, abortion exception).
Yeah, it's infuriating to me that the legislative and executive can pass and sign a law, spend lots of time and money enforcing it, and then only when someone's rights are actually infringed upon, does someone have to gamble by breaking the law and challenging it. And, this process may take years (all the while the state can often keep enforcing the law) and lots of money, and may result in failure for any number of technicalities, or result in the offending government pulling the rug out to render the exact case moot while keeping all of the substantial infringing provisions (like New York did before Bruen and I think is trying to do again), or result in the court granting relief on some specific case without addressing the big issue (like with one of the original Colorado baker/photography cases, which didn't address whether the law was constitutional, but was resolved based on the outright animus the commission in charge had for religion).
One issue is the strength of precedent--as zeke points out, you could rush to challenge a law in a way that is deliberately going to fail, and then use this precedent to prevent future challenges. Having a long process, requiring standing, requiring that other factors are not obscuring the relevant issue, etc. does make it harder to deliberately bring a weak challenge. Overturning precedent is difficult, but it does happen; it's probably net positive that courts are reluctant to say "no this previous court was just wrong from the get-go." On the other hand, the legal system already has a concept of "bad faith" and it seems like it should be relatively easy to identify that, say, an organization which explicitly supported some law is also supporting the lawsuit "challenging" it. Similarly it already has a concept of "vexatious litigants", as well as laws for specific cases like anti-SLAPP and PLCAA, even if such protections are probably under-utilized. So it seems like there are many avenues to prevent or invalidate bad-faith legal proceedings and punish those involved.
Yes. You can't precedent or procedure or automate your way around the bedrock truth that societies work more smoothly when everyone (1) is approximately on the same page, (2) is willing to act on the spirit of the rules rather than the letter, and (3) trust the other side to do so as well.
Without those things, everything just devolves back into low-trust, cynical, you're-not-winning-if-you're-not-cheating hardball.
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It is, and the concept of the "friendly suit" is known to the courts. But of course these procedural issues work only if the court wants them to work; the courts are supposed to be impartial but they are often not. See for instance Bruen, where a number of gun cases in the appeals decision had their circuit-level decision vacated and remanded. The Circuit Courts, rather than deciding the cases according to the Bruen precedent, sent them back to the District Courts, nominally to have the issues re-litigated but more likely just as a delaying tactic to keep the laws in play until Bruen can be completely gutted by the lower courts.
Sadly, "the courts all make up their own laws" is not a problem that any system can solve, short of getting rid of courts (or making them so secondary to the legislature they may as well not exist); symmetrically, the legislature can ignore the constitution, unless restrained by another branch. Any legal system has to be enforced by people.
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There's the Scopes Monkey Trial, which has passed into pop culture as a brave stand for the cause of Science against craw-thumping ignorance, but which was a test case that both sides wanted. In spite of an admittedly dumb law being passed by a local politician who wanted to virtue signal and gain votes, there were so few Brave Heroes of Science being persecuted for teaching evolution in schools that they had to fix up a test case. The town fathers were happy to be cast as the prosecuting baddies, since Dayton was dying on its feet and they felt that national publicity and notoriety could only do it good. The Brave Heroes had to find a willing guy who wasn't too sure if he had actually ever taught evolution, but he was happy to be the patsy.
So what really was the result there? A victory for teaching science in schools? Not really, Scopes lost the trial but the verdict was overturned. Keeping religion out of schools? Maybe, but I think it was a win that cost too much, since now America seems to have an entrenched battle between creationists and 'I love Science' crowd, where it is possible to have "evolution cannot be taught in school" enforced and textbooks denying it used if the local school district bends to that influence.
So instead of a dumb law being quietly ignored and dying away, the whole thing was given fresh life and the pitched battle between Science and Religion in schools continues to be fought.
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Biggest issues are: (1) there is a concern that someone sandbags and res judicata prohibits in earnest petitioners in the future and (2) constitutionally standing is an interpretation of case or controversy.
I do think standing serves a purpose but perhaps it could be relaxed (eg allow minority party in congress to have standing).
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