10-08-2019, 03:36 PM
(10-08-2019, 03:24 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: You did, but I was distracted by funny stuff on YouTube and it didn't register.
My issue with it is that hearing a moot case is the court expanding its own authority. The rules regarding what the court can take up keep its power limited. SCOTUS can't just reach down and grab a case it wants to hear; it needs to go through all of the channels of appeal before it is brought to them as the final step. If a decision is handed out on a moot case then you are setting a judicial precedent for future courts that expands their ability to hear cases that are moot simply because the majority of the court wants to take it on.
I don't at all disagree that the questions in this case are important and need to be reviewed, but the SCOTUS hearing a moot case is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The alternative is allowing a clearly unscrupulous party to game the system. As you just pointed out, the path for a case to get to SCOTUS is long and difficult. If the defendant chose to wait until the SCOTUS decides to hear a case to finally alter the law that prompted it then the blame rests solely on them. Additionally, as described above, there is still legitimate grounds for grievance on the part of the plaintiff. NYC played a disingenuous and highly partisan game with their citizen's Constitutional rights and now they're being held to account. Allowing them to game the system as they intended would be a far more damaging precedent in my opinion.
