THREAD: This is for students and new lawyers. Much of the history of US law is courts concocting doctrines to prevent themselves from doing justice. That's not normal, or inevitable, and you shouldn't accept it. It's part of a strategy. (1)
Legal elites in our society know that there is an enormous gap between the way the law is written on marble monuments and the way that the law is lived and experienced by the most vulnerable people. One of the roles of courts is to dress brutal state violence in fancy words. (2)
It therefore becomes important to powerful people that the legal system hide the gap between stated values and actual reality as much as possible, because a system that constantly fails to conform to its own basic values and principles would lose legitimacy. (3)
The courts use doctrines like abstention, sovereign immunity, absolute immunity, qualified immunity, mootness, standing, state secrets, etc. both to prevent discovery of facts but also to avoid publicly having to decide the merits of issues that would expose the gap. (4)
This is why, for example, no victim of U.S. torture and kidnapping in the "war on terror" ever had their case against the U.S. government fully litigated on the merits. And it's why courts refuse to rule on major civil rights cases challenging mass incarceration. (5)
As you learn about these doctrines, don't accept them as neutral wisdom. Know that they are tactics created by powerful people for political reasons, that they are not democratic, and that we can change them through political struggle through social movements.
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