Opponents of the proposition pick a district court with a judge whose bias is known.
First you can not "pick" a District Court Judge, cases are assigned to District Court Judges.
The state puts up a defense, loses, and then does not appeal. There are, now, no safeguards blocking this sequence.
The first ruling is the safeguard...Judges can not just rule according to their gut or "bias" they have to follow precedent - they can not ignore case law nor can the attorneys.
Besides, if you think the State is acting so unethically, in basically throwing the case (which again is not really possible in a Federal Court Civil Rights Case), then they will simply take the appeal to blok a private party from doing so, and just lose that case. Then what? Appeal to the SCOTUS? Well as it stands the SCOTUS does not have to take any case, in fact the majority of cases they appealed to them they do not to take, approximately 90% of every case they hear is some death penalty appeal. SCOTUS has a history of passing on very important issues, and could have passed on DOMA if they wanted.
The protection of the court is useless if you cannot get your day in court.
They had there day in Court and lost, they decided not to appeal, no one can force a party to appeal. It is not for private parties to assume they could have done better than the State and interject themselves in the State's place and appeal. That opens a floodgate of real issues. Who has standing when multiple parties want to take the case? What if one of those parties is actually adverse to the position?
You may not pick the judge, but you can pick the district. Also not every case filed will go all of the way through to a decision, so you can file multiple cases then actually litigate the one that wound up in front of the judge that you want. (There are safeguards against that. They are imperfect...)
Furthermore while in theory judges have to follow precedent and case law, in practice there are lots of cases where well-meaning and dedicated judges, presented with the same facts, precedent, and case law, will come to opposite conclusion. Were it otherwise, the Supreme Court would never have dissenting opinions.
Finally, courts do have the right to request that the arguments that they wish to hear about particular points of law be made in front of them. For example in proposition 8, the justices required that the standing argument be made, even though neither side wanted to advance it. In the Affordable Healthcare Act this went further. An attorney, Robert Long, wound up having to be appointed specifically to make the case to the Supreme Court for a point that neither side wished to argue. That point being that the law was a tax, and therefore under the Anti-Injunction Act no lawsuit could be brought about it until after someone had been injured by actually paying it.
That last point matters in this case. The state actively did not want to defend this case in front of the district court. The judge wanted it defended. That is how a different set of attorneys got involved in the first place.
Comments
First you can not "pick" a District Court Judge, cases are assigned to District Court Judges.
The first ruling is the safeguard...Judges can not just rule according to their gut or "bias" they have to follow precedent - they can not ignore case law nor can the attorneys.
Besides, if you think the State is acting so unethically, in basically throwing the case (which again is not really possible in a Federal Court Civil Rights Case), then they will simply take the appeal to blok a private party from doing so, and just lose that case. Then what? Appeal to the SCOTUS? Well as it stands the SCOTUS does not have to take any case, in fact the majority of cases they appealed to them they do not to take, approximately 90% of every case they hear is some death penalty appeal. SCOTUS has a history of passing on very important issues, and could have passed on DOMA if they wanted.
They had there day in Court and lost, they decided not to appeal, no one can force a party to appeal. It is not for private parties to assume they could have done better than the State and interject themselves in the State's place and appeal. That opens a floodgate of real issues. Who has standing when multiple parties want to take the case? What if one of those parties is actually adverse to the position?
You may not pick the judge, but you can pick the district. Also not every case filed will go all of the way through to a decision, so you can file multiple cases then actually litigate the one that wound up in front of the judge that you want. (There are safeguards against that. They are imperfect...)
Furthermore while in theory judges have to follow precedent and case law, in practice there are lots of cases where well-meaning and dedicated judges, presented with the same facts, precedent, and case law, will come to opposite conclusion. Were it otherwise, the Supreme Court would never have dissenting opinions.
Finally, courts do have the right to request that the arguments that they wish to hear about particular points of law be made in front of them. For example in proposition 8, the justices required that the standing argument be made, even though neither side wanted to advance it. In the Affordable Healthcare Act this went further. An attorney, Robert Long, wound up having to be appointed specifically to make the case to the Supreme Court for a point that neither side wished to argue. That point being that the law was a tax, and therefore under the Anti-Injunction Act no lawsuit could be brought about it until after someone had been injured by actually paying it.
That last point matters in this case. The state actively did not want to defend this case in front of the district court. The judge wanted it defended. That is how a different set of attorneys got involved in the first place.