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Originally Posted by Lestat
God I hope you're wrong. I agree there wasn't much to be done about candidate Trump or president-elect Trump, but now that he's president he owns his actions and so do his cabinet picks. If they break the law or do not follow the constitution there will be consequences.
There was
a phenomenal article that bobman posted
here right after election day:
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But Llewellyn was a leading thinker of the school of thought known as "legal realism," and "The Bramble Bush" is also a major statement of that philosophy. In a famous passage, Llewellyn wrote:
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This doing of something about disputes, this doing of it reasonably, is the business of the law. And the people who have the doing of it in charge, whether they be judges or sheriffs or clerks or jailers or lawyers, are officials of the law. What these officials do about disputes is, to my mind, the law itself.
He went on:
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And rules, in all of this, are important to you so far as they help you see or predict what judges will do or so far as they help you to get judges to do something. That is their importance. That is all their importance, except as pretty playthings.
In short: the law is a set of guidelines that tells you how actors involved in the law are
likely to act in a given matter; the actual, de facto, law in practice is, ultimately, whatever those people decide it is, regardless of whether it conforms with the written law or not.
The Trump administration is probably going to be a major test of whether Llewellyn is right. I'm not optimistic for the "constitutional principles will win out" side.