Say what you will, but I want to at least throw it out there that maybe you should wait until at least you've been at law school for a bit before you so readily criticize a Supreme Court ruling. It is undeniable that yes, this ruling sucks for the plaintiffs in this actual case and for people who may become the subject of an aggressive city in the future. But, the opinions themselves show that this case was about a lot more than fair and unfair. It was, to a large degree, about precedent. Some pretty well-entrenched precedent existed that logically pointed to this outcome, as troubling as that may have been for the 5 Justice majority. I'm sure they weren't sitting around saying "Aha, I'm going to rule this way because I like shopping malls better than poor people." They looked at the precedent and said "well, this is how the cookie crumbles unless we completely change course on this issue." With so much course changing occuring in other recent Supreme Court opinions, I am sure these Justices are a little tired of the "activist" word. This case also had a lot to do with deference. Those of you that are about to go to law school will learn about the significant deference that courts are supposed to give to decisions made by other branches of government that have the authority and expertise needed to make those decisions. It isn't a court's job to second-guess everything that the executive or legislative branches do. Instead, the court's sole role is to weigh in on the legality of a decision, not the wisdom. At the Supreme Court level, their job is to determine the constitutionality of a decision, and the Constitution cuts a pretty broad swath of permissible actions, especially in the economic arena.
Though I usually tend to side with the O'Connor, Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist group, I think the majority got this one right. The dissent is "correct" when it says that this opens the door to many abusive practices, but its slippery-slope logic is a fallacy and the political process will, theoretically, keep the local governments in check.
I don’t think one needs a law degree to justify the belief that an opinion of a court is faulty. Ultimately, every case that makes it way to the Supreme Court has the complexity you suggest. Moreover, most cases have even more competing policy purposes to be considered than the instant case. And while going into all of the complexities of the case may be warranted on a law exam, to the rest of the world, the decision in the end is all that matters. Everything else is academic.
Would one suggest criticism of the Dred Scott decision be suspended until after One L?
But there is a more fundamental flaw in your analysis that warrants comment. You are correct in that courts, even the Supreme Court, must respect binding precedent. However, the determination of whether the facts of the case apply to it adequately enough to consider it binding leaves a lot of discretion in the hands of a judge. Some judges said the facts were consistent with prior rulings, the dissenters said they were not. To say that the (slim) majority was bound by the decision and their holding was “correct” implies that (sizeable) minority opinion effectively ignored precedent and were incorrect. The complexity that you argue makes deliberateness in opinion necessary also increases the odds that there is no one correct answer. Most cases, in reality, are merely a matter of opinion (as evidenced by the split rulings that are all too common from the Supremes).
Further, while you are correct that judges don’t (or at least should not) decide cases based merely on their preferences for which type of person should be a winner and which should loser, the myriad of policy purposes which are undeniably involved in this case and others can lead to a persuasive argument from either side of the debate. In the end, however, it is the individual’s sense of which policy purposes should prevail which governs their opinion.
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