every time some horrible new law or bill or policy or whatever comes to light & people worry about it, some lawyerly type comes out and goes "see, you guys just don't understand the law. there's something called stare decisis in this fabulous common law system of ours. you don't even know what the text of this law means. judges won't interpret it the way the media is telling you that they could. the DMCA was supposedly going to ban xeroxes, and where are we now?" and so on and so forth, i'm sure you've come across this before, and while on the one hand they are often correct about specific procedural details & more broadly correct that most people don't understand the court system (this is, in my view, a deliberate feature of the court system, & not something to be obnoxious about), i always think about stump v. sparkman
stump v. sparkman is a supreme court case decided in 1978. there are all sorts of specific details of the case; i'm not a lawyer, and i've never formally studied law, etc. here's the rough outline: in 1971, a woman applied to a judge to sign an order to have her fifteen year old daughter sterilized. the judge signed the order, and a child was sterilized without her knowledge, much less her consent. that child found out years later that she had been sterilized, and sued; because of jurisdiction issues, the court only agreed to hear claims against the judge who signed the order; the supreme court determined that the judge was immune to any & all complaint, because he was fulfilling a judicial function. there is no law that says judges may order random children sterilized. he did something that it was not within the limited power of his office to do. however, the court still found (for various reasons) that he could not be found liable for having done it. he remained a sitting judge.
judicial immunity is extremely strong. the people who are empowered to enact "justice" do so at all levels with extremely little oversight, and they are fully aware that as a general rule the people with whom they deal have very little understanding of the law and very little ability to seek redress for mistreatment. this fact applies for police, whose qualified immunity has been the subject of much public discussion, but they aren't the only ones. i am extremely tired of being told that people who are concerned about [FL's "don't say gay" bill, or TX's recent order regarding trans children & their families, or honestly pick your favorite, there's no shortage of awful law] are, like, being hysterical about the potential fallout of these bills, because any power explicitly codified in law should be understood as left to the interpretation of a group of people who are inured to almost all consequences
