A principle of law that everyone ensnarled in any sort of legal shenanigan should be aware of is stare decisis. This Latin phrase means “to abide by, or adhere to, decided things” (Black’s Law Dictionary). Law proceeds and “evolves” in accordance with stare decisis.
Anybody who’s read a Grisham novel or seen its screen adaptation knows that precedents are evoked to establish the merits of legal arguments. Precedents are cases whose judicial opinions imposed some novel tweak, limit, or elaboration on previous opinions. Law “advances” by means of this sort of accretion and seldom backpedals. Lawyers inform judges of precedents to persuade them that such-and-such was agreed upon by another judge, so you guys need to form your rulings correspondently.
The orientation of the courts is toward accepting that what’s previously been found to be the case must remain the case (or “the truth”).
Victims of restraining order fraud express amazement at the courts’ unwillingness to acknowledge obvious lies by designing plaintiffs (applicants). The fact is that once a restraining order has been successfully petitioned, and this is simply a matter of a plaintiff plaintively persuading a judge of his or her need in a 10-minute interview, it becomes a (presumptively) decided matter. Court rhetoric would have it believed that no final conclusion is made until the defendant can be heard in opposition, but all things judicial lean toward the notion exemplified by stare decisis, that is, what’s decided is decided.
Translation: “It’s true, because we said it was.” This is called a tautology (the assertion that a fact is its own reason) and would get a practitioner tossed out of Critical Thinking 101.
Defendants who opt to contest false allegations on restraining orders only to have judges belittle their efforts in the brief, half-hour hearings afforded them often report being horrified by judicial bias, laziness, or indifference, and leave courtrooms feeling like the outcomes were preordained.
That’s because in a very real sense they were.
Ex parte rulings may well be done deals, because judges, consciously or not, follow the precept that they should adhere to precedents and not unsettle things previously established (“stare decisis et non quieta movere”). And all restraining orders are approved ex parte, that is, without judges even knowing who defendants are, so what has previously been established has been established unilaterally (that is, prejudicially or one-sidedly) and in the absence of due process of law.
Restraining order appeals, which may climb successive rungs of the court ladder if defendants possess the financial means and moral fortitude to keep resisting, face this prejudice all the way up. So too do lawsuits seeking damages for restraining order abuse (especially if litigants are self-represented).
If you ever receive an apology from a judge, frame it.
Truth may literally be irrelevant. Procedural rules trump it and incline and authorize judges not merely to discount contradictory evidence provided by defendants but to ignore it entirely. Some disturbed person’s incriminatory fantasy, therefore, can drain the quality of years of a restraining order defendant’s life. This is the grotesque reality of the restraining order process and underscores its inherent corruption.
Government studies have concluded that a majority of restraining orders (80% by at least one reckoning) are issued unnecessarily or on false grounds.
It’s clear then that unless due process is retrofitted into the system, and defendants are granted the opportunity to be heard prior to restraining orders’ being issued so that they’re not forced to enter the process having to clear the hurdle of an unfair prejudgment (on top of feeling betrayed and menaced by the state), restraining orders will necessarily continue to do more harm than they arrest.
It would also be nice if the statutory consequence of prison time for those who lie to the courts were once and while enforced.
Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com
TALKING BACK to restraining orders 
Reblogged this on Falsely Accused.
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This articulates my exact feelings. I am shocked at the illogical process by a justice system lacking of any justice. I’ve been dealing with false allegations resulting in a TRO. When the plaintiff reached out to me via email saying they wanted to drop it etc and it was getting out of hand I, thinking a sociopathic narcissist had a change of heart, called to talk like adults. I was arrested the next day for violating a restraining order. I recently lost my job and have had to spend about 15,000 in lawyer fees as they are allowed to file for a restrsining order, have it become final and then drop it. It’s a kalfkaesque nightmare.
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It would appear initial post is true that once the order is issued, unless the petitioner cancels the order most will become permanent. In my case the permanent order was granted by the judge based on “you appear to be controlling” and “she seems to have some apprehension towards you”. I was not found guilty of the abuse that was the basis for the order to begin with, just that the judge felt I was a possible threat to her. So here I sit pondering if I should appeal this or just live my life at this point it is obvious there is no going back with her. How
may this affect my future divorce, my life since she is here on a visa and will most likely go for the VAWA claim for her visa. Did my lawyer not represent me properly? Should I appeal? I feel I must to protect myself from other damages? I am lost, confused and KNOW I did not abuse her, the judge did not cite any abuse as her basis for approving the permanent order, how is that possible?
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Because the judge was engaging in judicial corruption, I believe. That’s the whole system: Corruption. However, you could appeal. If you proved how there could not have been domestic violence and culpability (rather than defending and denying it all without reasons), then there should be a basis for appeal: No domestic violence occurred.
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That is correct, I thought my lawyer proved that the abuse as noted in the affidavit for 3 days did not occur on 2 of the days, one to the extent I were never physically alone, and on the third day it was an argument over access to the cellphone as she attempted to take the phone(S) from me. She in her testimony corroborated that. Also, we proved that after the alleged abuse, which included hitting her with a laptop, that occurred two days in a row the police took her from the residence questioned her and looked at her and found NO EVIDENCE to charge or arrest me. Bear in mind this abuse happened in a different state than the one the protective order was granted in at this point.
My parents also attested to the fact that they NEVER saw us fighting, arguing or heard her screaming as she noted in her affidavit. My lawyer also showed how I did not have ANY TIES to VA and lived in another state at least 10 hrs in a vehicle, so the threat of future violence was not realistic.
Now they did have some phone msgs from the night after my wife left with the police and txt messages. On the vm I was clearly drunk and said many things, but none indicated threats to harm or hurt her. I stated I need to protect myself, ensure she goes back home since I was “responsible for her” per what I knew at the time as related to her entrance to the USA on a visa(now I know that is not true) and many other choice words, f bombs. The thing is my lawyer did not cross with and I think it should have happened was asking questions like, is that the typical vm you’d receive from him, how many times as he left you vm’s, has he ever said things like this at another point in time before or after.
So no threat of future harm, the basis for the order which was abuse on three days was shown(again, so I thought) to be false, an ulterior motive related to obtaining her VISA..and I still LOST?! Something went wrong here.
Either my lawyer did not present or cross examine her the best way possible and/or the judge just did not care and was going to “err on the side of caution” even with all of the proof in her face showing that the affidavit were blatant lies/fraud. There is no justice in this and I would have been better not paying for a lawyer, based on the outcome.
I am considering appealing this “pro se”, to fight the order and have it dismissed. But the fact is I do not LIVE in that state, it appears(from my limited reading) I would have to make frequent trips to file paperwork, followup through the clerk’s office and I just do not have the time for that. Sadly, I may need to let this be. Aside from the fact that I do not care to have anymore contact with her, it would have been very interesting to represent myself and “force” her to look at me and try to lie. Cause in the hearing the other day she looked at me twice in the course of 3+ hours. Lastly, the drain and stress I place on my parents by having to drive them to the other state, which 10+ hours away may not be worth the fight, although I KNOW I WAS WRONGED and justice, the rule of the LAW did not prevail, only a judge doing a “CYA” move.
I am very disappointed in our system, I really thought we had sound proof, facts and in the end even she corroborated most of it, unwillingly, during cross as she contradicted herself. The system to me is a joke, farce, because we proved that the abuse did not occur and the “preponderance of evidence” should have been almost eliminated in terms of validating her claims, but it DID NOT MATTER?!
I am more so sadden that the person I so loved and worked so hard to bring to the USA, in fact lied to the degree she did, she was trained. I had prepared myself to hear her do so, but once reality set in, in court, I was lost, confused, disappointed though never displayed it..but was.
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These instruments, as you’ve already perceived, are marvelous levers in divorce and child custody negotiations. I’ve even heard of defendants being openly blackmailed: “Do [X], and my client will drop the restraining order.”
I’m sorry you had to realize what these proceedings are about the hard way. It doesn’t matter if plaintiffs lie self-evidently or brutally. It only matters whether the court can find some justification to uphold the orders it enters. As you point out, the court doesn’t confirm or deny allegations, nor does it confirm or deny that plaintiffs have lied. It uses weasel rhetoric: “The defendant says…” or “The plaintiff alleges.” Its responsibility to judge the accuracy of defendants’ and plaintiffs’ claims is often shirked. Sometimes a judge will even enter false interpretations on the record in (reflex) deference to plaintiffs without investigating the truth value of their allegations. No one’s going to judge them for it.
The official line is judges are looking out for the interests of plaintiffs (itself an abrogation of judicial ethics); an equivalent truth is that judges look out for their own interests (which, of course, is also a violation of judicial ethics). Plaintiffs succeed by providing plausible stories to the court; judges validate these stories by entering plausible interpretations on the record.
It’s a game.
The answer to your question is that the order, as entered by your wife and the judge, remains on public record and is available to public scrutiny (indefinitely). Whether a judge accepted that you abused her or not is irrelevant, because anyone who consults the record—an employer, for instance—isn’t going to look that closely or feel there’s any reason to suspect a judge of partiality or a woman of lying.
This is among the damning effects of this corrupt process.
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Here is a great website that I found that relates to inductive reasoning, which may be useful for any individual attempting to overcome the “preponderance of the evidence” ordeal:
http://www.criticalthinkeracademy.com/12-what-is-inductive-logic.html
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I think that restraining orders can also be said to be cruel and unusual. They appear to shift the burden of proof to the defendant, which is obscene in criminal hearings. In criminal proceedings, the burden of proof is on the prosecutor. In these restraining order hearings, the defendant has to use inductive and conductive reasoning to prove his or her innocence. Be that false allegations are present, the defendant has to use such reasoning to draw on his or her past experiences and use them as evidence to state why he or she could not have committed the past acts with a guilty mind to the alleged victim. It’s not impossible to do that, I would think, unless a person has forgotten his or her past.
I do not doubt that emotional distress may have an impact on a person’s memory, thus causing him or her to forget things by the time the hearing occurs: The person’s memory may have become warped throughout time, thus generating a false memory by the hearing comes or if the hearing is dismissed. Furthermore, memories are malleable. They change. Environmental aspects cause what may be one person’s memory to change throughout time. In my experience, what a person has to do is go collect a large amount of evidence and testimony for why an allegation by an alleged victim cannot be true, and use that to make an inductive argument, thus increasing the credibility of the defendant and disproving the allegation of the petitioner. However, to gather all such evidence is a time consuming task that costs a fair amount of money. As such, you could say that the goal of the courts in allowing these proceedings is to teach people a lesson: Stay out of court.
However, a person with skills in argumentation, philosophy, and legal knowledge could just as well come back to the court with evidence and testimony to build an inductive argument and give the middle finger to the judge in the end of all of it. For the judge to punish people so easily means that the judges are intentionally inflicting emotional distress onto defendants as a form of operant conditioning. Sure, yes, judges are trying to make a kind of “learned helplessness.” I do not doubt that. However, it’s not impossible to argue against the judge and tell the judge to screw off: The issue is that when not given an attorney, given 14 to 21 days to make an argument, and not given the funds to collect evidence, the petitioner ends up “winning” while making ignorant arguments that lack legal validity and proof of culpability.
It is indeed the judges who know about these things going on. It is truly a cruel and unusual process.
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I was contacted recently by the mother of a young college student—a girl barely out of high school—who had been served with an emergency protection order by her counselor, because the two had bumped into each other a few times in public (in a town with a population so small it should have been called a village: 2,000 people) and passed each other on a common road. The counselor, who was clearly disturbed and who may have been jealous of the girl after introducing her to people and encouraging her to attend her church, alleged she feared for her life, because the girl had “cut her off in traffic,” which would have been a ridiculous allegation even if it had been true. The girl got the injunction on a Thursday and had to defend herself in court the following Monday. She was denied even the two to three weeks you’ve fairly recognized as insufficient for mounting a proper defense. What can anyone muster in four days?
More recently I’ve been in correspondence with a woman who was assaulted by a short-term boyfriend, was denied a restraining order by a female judge who was likewise charmed by the boyfriend, and was then served with a restraining order petitioned by her assailant—alleging, among other things, violence—which stuck despite her being represented by an eminent attorney. This is psychological torture, and this kind of thing absolutely does drive people to despair.
For what?
Anybody who contemplates these things and wants to believe in our system of laws is similarly driven to despair. These judges aren’t even proper villains. I really don’t think they’re fully conscious of the havoc and hell they wreak. They behave unthinkingly, and the hell they subject people to is right out of Kafka. They seem like reasoning people. They’re agents of a system that represents itself and is represented to citizens as reasoning and reasonable. And they may be no more susceptible to reason than typewriters. The real problem is they don’t have to be reasonable. And they should have to be.
For someone, especially someone like you with a background in argumentation (I have the same background), being discounted by agents of the state who may reject your arguments precisely because they’re confidently asserted, cogent, or impossible to deny is maddening.
Judicial conclusions are what they’re supposed to be more often than not. Judges are supposed to credit plaintiffs’ stories. That’s what they’ve been conditioned to do. Government grants are leveraged (in the half-a-million-dollar range on average) based on the willingness of (individual) police departments and courts to have their officers (re-)educated, that is, programmed. Is it any wonder that people who know about this goggle in astonishment and, in voicing their outrage, sound like nuts? The federal government very literally pays courts to have them submit their officers to instruction about how to receive and rule on allegations. And this is all done right out in the open. Besides policy, even the law is dictated by special interests. In my state (Arizona) as in yours, mutual restraining orders are forbidden. The clause that prohibits this exactly mirrors the terms of the contracts for the above-mentioned grants (so qualification for further grant monies is preserved).
What judges are actually supposed to be is free of preconception and immune to influence. The exasperating thing is that these aren’t subtle wrongs; they’re glaring.
And to the general public, perceptually subliminal.
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I also think that there is one other thing I’ve noticed about restraining orders ties to acts, such as the Illinois Domestic Violence Act of 1986 and the Illinois Stalking No Contact Order Act of 2010. If an individual lacked culpability, the court does not care. I actually firmly believe that the court recognizes that a person lacked culpability or else there was not enough evidence to prove that the respondent lacked culpability. The thing is, the courts are lashing out at people who come into their courtroom in an attempt to domesticate people. For anyone who has ever researched the Silver Fox experiment, it was a program to domesticate animals and make them tame and timid. That is exactly what these courts are doing.
A person once told me that the courts sign off on the restraining orders to teach people a lesson: Stay out of court. However, that does not do much good in an attempt to consider a person as a reasonable person. A problem with this, though, is that the courts may be trampling on people’s first amendment rights in an attempt to domesticate people. Now, that sounds really corrupt to me. For instance, I had an Illinois Stalking No Contact order placed on me. The sad thing? It was that I had a false memory at the time (I mixed a woman of my past up with a different woman of my past). I considered that the court had trampled on my first amendment right in an attempt to domesticate me into a “reasonable person.”
Personally, I spent a fair amount of time in a big city with people who compete, argue, bitch, and bicker. It was my hicktown of a county (Winnebago County, Illinois) who considered my speech to be too aggressive. I’m still looking into whether or not I can sue Winnebago County on a first amendment right violation. I know at least one person has sued the county so far, but I do not know if the person has won. To say the least, I did not stalk the girl.
That’s why I think it’s important that people look into what’s really going on: actus reas and mens rea. These courts are abusing the restraining order process in an attempt to develop a Silver Fox experiment.
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Totally. The orientation of restraining order courts is punitive: “Bad boy! Bad girl!” The conclusion that a reasonable person who’s put through this ringer will arrive at is stay out of court. This is a dangerous lesson for the courts to be teaching, though, because its corollary is this: take the law into your own hands, because the courts aren’t to be trusted. Consistent with my response to your earlier comment, the courts compromise their own credibility just as feminists have compromised theirs. This isn’t of concern to either, because neither is held to account. Nobody pays any attention to the facts, and the rhetoric of those with political power rules. If some abused and maligned defendant picks up a gun in his or her despondency and outrage and lashes out, it’s easy to spin his or her action as a confirmation that s/he was unstable and needed restraining. That a stable person was destabilized by vicious abuses would never be considered by an outside auditor.
(If any outside auditors are reading this, incidentally, know that any number of very reasonable, highly educated, and morally evolved people who’ve responded to this blog and who’ve been battered by false allegations and the validation of those allegations by the courts have copped to having homicidal fantasies. And no wonder. Imagine being falsely labeled a stalker, creep, brute, sexual sicko, etc. Imagine further having that label smacked on your forehead by a judge who doesn’t know you and doesn’t care, and maybe derives more than a little relish from seeing you flinch or buckle. And imagine finally that that judge’s action has now authorized a false accuser to go about telling anyone s/he pleases that the court agrees you’re a stalker, creep, brute, or sicko. People have been driven to homicide or suicide by much less. All of those I refer to, moreover, were actually the abused parties, that is, the victims of stalkers, creeps, brutes, and sickos. The sickos were awarded restraining orders against their victims.)
You’re so right. This is about taming—by stick, not carrot. More pointedly, it’s about breaking people’s will. I actually invoked an experiment in animal behavioral conditioning in an argument I made to a judge once: “learned helplessness.” This phrase refers to a cruel experiment in which behaviorists dropped rats into buckets of water and timed how long they flailed around before drowning. Rats are pretty determined swimmers and hold out for quite a while. If, however, rats are first firmly grasped by experimenters until they learn that resistance is futile, they quickly drown when dropped in the same buckets of water, because they’ve been conditioned to helplessness. The courts (the experimenters) condition defendants to become those defeated animals.
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Quoting Black’s Law Dicionary:
Mens rea. As an element of criminal responsibility: a guilty mind; a guilty or wrongful purpose; a criminal intent. Guilty knowledge and willfulness.
Actus reus. The “guilty act.” A wrongful deed which renders the actor criminally liable if combined with mens rea. The actus reus is the physical aspect of a crime, whereas the mens rea (guilty mind) involves the intent factor.
Often restraining orders are sought in the absence both of wrongful purpose and wrongful action. Even “legitimate” restraining orders, that is, ones not based on lies, may be petitioned on no other grounds than the (alleged) emotional state of the applicant: “I’m afraid” (which is really no more valid a grounds for seeking government interference into another person’s life than “I’m constipated”). This authorizes a court to ascribe mens rea (guilty intent) to the defendant and to issue an order that makes perfectly legal, everyday actions actus rei (guilty acts) punishable by incarceration. The defendant can then be locked up for deeds thereby deemed unlawful even in the absence of wrongful intent, for example, a defendant may respond to repeated pleas from his child for help…and be arrested for it.
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I guess a person could say in a lot of ways that because people are not granted an attorney during restraining order hearings, then judges have an ability to press defendants under their thumb. I believe a good attorney working for a respondent or defendant of a restraining order case is going to consider whether or not there is evidence of the actus reas and mens rea. Personally, I’ve never really went about studying law growing up: I tried to be a good person and avoid the law. Simple things, such as battery and murder, were easy knowledge for me: It’s illegal to intentionally injure and kill people. That’s common knowledge, I would think.
I think one of the reasons that judges grant restraining orders in the petitioner’s favor is because the lack of knowledge or wisdom on the respondent’s side tends to cause a judge to believe that a petitioner and respondent cannot get a long. As such, the judge steps in as an intervening factor that disrupts the relationship between the respondent and the petitioner. However, the judges do not take effort to work as preventative individuals and quickly mediate and resolve things. Because of that, issues escalate to the point of argumentation.
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Yeah, the presumption of the courts is that if people could work things out on their own, they would. This is of course ridiculous. As you know, it’s just as likely that the applicant of a restraining order is the unreasonable party. If there were no means to coerce the state into intervening, chances are that most situations in which this process is invoked would have to be resolved between the parties, that is, they would have to behave like adults (“gwoan-ups”). The restraining order process invites infantile behavior and rewards infantile behavior; and the courts furthermore like treating adults like children. That’s why I’ve referred to this arena as a sandbox.
One recently commenter refers to it as a litter box, which extends the metaphor very aptly.
That’s why “feminist” defense of the process is so revolting to true feminists who believe that women should stand on their own two feet: it encourages plaintiffs, who traditionally have been and still predominantly are women, to run crying to a daddy surrogate in a robe (“wobe”).
Establishment/mainstream feminists today will claim that women seek restraining orders as countermeasures against masculine violence, which is only true in a small minority of cases. Their presumption (or self-serving fairy tale) is the same as the courts’: no one would apply for a restraining order if she didn’t absolutely have to. That claim should be mentally heard in a Marilyn Monroe voice, which is why actually hearing self-styled feminists pronounce its equivalent is sad if not nauseating: whether it’s the case that mainstream feminists’ are ignorantly childish or knowingly childish, the fact that they’re childish is ineluctable, and this fact is repellent to people who believe that women aren’t children and shouldn’t be treated like children or encouraged to act like children.
The inconvenient truth is that motives for seeking state “protections” are far likelier to be spiteful than fearful. And pretending this isn’t the case, as the courts and gender feminists do, only compromises the credibility of at-risk individuals who genuinely need protection.
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The judges who consciously ignore a lack of evidence in relation to actus reus and mens rea during a petitioner’s ex parte hearing are engaging in an act of willful blindness. I firmly believe that a reasonable attorney, and judges more than not come from a background of having been an attorney or lawyer, are able to understand concepts, such as evidence-based argumentation, actus reus, and mens rea: A reasonable attorney is being defined as an attorney who holds fundamental law and argumentation knowledge (someone who passed the LSAT and bar exam). As the judges are to be considered professionals, they are to be held to a higher standard. Therefore, when a judge (1) encounters information from a petitioner who lacks evidence in relation to the actus reus and mens rea and (2) allows the ex parte order to be filed, then the judge is engaging in act of barratry. As money in the form of grants, such as money from the Violence Against Women Act and the Department of Justice, can be involved somewhere in these proceedings, it gives motive to the judges to intentionally conduct barratry, thus allow the proceedings: You could say the judges are trying to reach a quota. So, there exists motive throughout all of this. Thus, if the judge is intentionally causing barratry, then the judge is also knowingly, recklessly, and negligently causing barratry. The willfull blindness leads to recklessness, which causing disruption in the social relationship between the petitioner and the respondent, which may cause escalation of violence, injury, or damage. As the judges are engaging in recklessness, they are negligently not taking into consideration the damage they’re going to do that a reasonable attorney would. So, what is the main motivator here: Money.
I have a background in argumentation, philosophy, and dealing with restraining orders. What I lacked, however, was a knowledge of “mens rea,” “culpability,” and case-law argumentation. Furthermore, a view of letter-of-the-law vs. spirit-of-the-law argumentation was lacking from my knowledge. What I noticed from my experience was that when the petitioner first filed against me, there were blatant lies (acts that never occurred) and allegations of acts (that may have occured in some way: language does not fully capture the Truth of an event). Once I was able to beef up my legal knowledge, I was able to look back and assign culpability to my acts. Afterward, I had noticed how fraudulent the petition was and how crooked and corrupt the court was that allowed the petition to go through. Nonetheless, blantant lies that are in total disregard of the truth made the petitioner’s malice obvious to me. However, the lack of evidence for culpability and my inductive reasoning made it obvious to me that I never committed a crime. I was falsely accused of criminal conduct. Upon recognizing that, I’ve come to believe that the county that I reside in is not a good county, thus I need to remove myself from this place. I’ve read in relation to classical legal positivism that the law used to be more accomodating to individuals with social status and wealth, because the goverment did not want to lose those individuals. However, that the county took an attack against me caused me to believe that the county is not worth living in.
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The courts follow a see-no-evil policy for sure.
The origins of our legal system extend back millennia. Our Constitution, by contrast, has only existed a few hundred years. The law didn’t only used to be more accommodating to individuals with social status and wealth; it still panders to them. And that’s on top of catering to (or even kowtowing to) attorneys, whose services are often only available to people of means.
Tweezing all of this out is a Herculean task, and this difficulty shields a corrupt system from savvy scrutiny. Judges aren’t evil. In my experience, they mostly just follow the path of least resistance. They go along to get along, and their job security is preserved by their playing by the established rules, which are very different ones than our supreme courts espouse (that is, the official rhetoric). Judges regard what they have to and disregard what they don’t (including the suffering they inflict directly or proximately). How much they may enjoy this varies: some judges clearly do relish hurting defendants, especially “uppity” ones, that is, ones who talk back (those in the category you’ve identified yourself as belonging to). Money and political peril make them pay attention, which is why the well-heeled fair better in the courts than those without resource and why restraining orders (whose advocates are well-heeled—to the tune of billions—and are de facto patrons of the police and judiciary) are mechanically approved and recalcitrantly defended even when shown to be based on dubious claims or utterly fraudulent ones.
The corruption reaches to the heart of the system itself.
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Quoting Black’s Law Dictionary:
Barratry. The offense of frequently exciting and stirring up quarrels and suits, either at law or otherwise.
His point (a good one) is that the courts themselves are culpable of fomenting discord. I’ve remarked that the courts casually approve restraining orders and then are loath to reconsider their decisions, because the method of the court is to abide by things decided. Viewed properly, though, the courts shouldn’t be poking their noses into people’s lives without exceptionally good reason. Fomenting conflict and calling it “pacification” is really just fomenting conflict.
In Arizona (I don’t know—maybe these things are everywhere), there’s a bumper sticker with a rattlesnake on it that reads, “Don’t tread on me.” The court’s first obligation should be to honor the liberty of private citizens, and it should only interfere with that liberty with great care and deliberation. As this commenter points out, the courts have been influenced (see this post) to intrude on people’s freedoms at the slightest excuse. This is not only an abrogation of judicial ethics and responsibility; it’s unconstitutional, unconscionable, and contrary to the most fundamental of American values.
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