Maggie's Farm

I don't think you know what "common law" means. unless you mean the doctrine of stare decisis but this forum gets its panties a-twist whenever there's a hint of judges making law from the bench.

there is very little common law in the sense that common law means the traditions or practices or customs of the people, inevitably, those are codified into statutes as amended by legislatures and interpreted by courts.

regulations are also ultimately a creature of their enabling statutes and are reviewable through independent administrative law courts and ultimately through Article III courts.

remember the "golden rule"? who has the gold makes the rules. this is why you don't want common law, meaning the customs, practices and traditions of who has the gold, as the general theory of law in the US. you think its bad now? you can't begin to imagine what it would be like with common law in the old sense.

FYI, "prior restraint" is a first amendment concept.

you're wrong, but not worth the waste of electrons to explain why.

I'm not interested in your comments. I don't know how to make this any clearer.

except that isn't exactly true either. typical of how states deal with english common law is that it is preserved except where it is displaced by statutes and limited (e.g., Cal.Civ.Code sec. 21.1 and 22.1 ("[t]he rule of the common law, that statutes in derogation thereof are to be strictly construed, has no application to this Code."). what's left of federal common law also exists at the will of congress and can be displaced by congress.

I think #2 was conflating concepts like stare decisis and cases like Madison v Marbury into a hazy definition of common law, and I've asked for clarification on what he meant; my response to him depends on that clarification.

while a litigant would cite interpretive decisions to a court, the source of law is inevitably a statute. a court "makes law" only in the sense that it fills in gaps only where legislative intent is unclear, and if a court is interpreting a statute, it means that common law is displaced to the extent it contradicts the statute. and if the text of the language clear, the court can't contradict the express intent of the legislature. this is a key issue in the upcoming OsamaCare case before the USSC. a law can be challenged on procedural or constitutional grounds, but that's not what we're talking about here.

the interpretation of a statutes often comes from administrative agencies who make the rules and policies to enforce the statutes, administrative appeals boards, independent administrative judges and, then, possibly, from federal courts. in these areas, the law much more resembles the civil law.

There would be a national shaming of colleges and universities for charging soaring tuition rates that are reaching lunatic levels.

"shaming"? the kid is mentally still in kollege.

I blame the parents who told a 17 year old that $100,000 in student debt was a good idea.

and that asshat deadbeat is giving bad advice, those student loans aren't dischargeable in BK and the collection efforts will follow him to his barista job.

its easy to hate him because he's an asshat. no doubt about it. but this hate distracts from the institutional problem of college financing.

the real problem I think is that there's no downward pressure on universities to keep tuition under control because, from their point of view, the government is handing out free money to them in the form of student loans, available to everyone, regardless of whether the education has a market value (meaning, repayment possible) or not (barista training). this is true whether the government makes the loans, or as before, guaranteed them.

17 year olds aren't that bright and aren't thinking about the future beyond college. so they get a pass for thinking that college = girls and football and a ticket to middle class life. but it was the parents who instilled that insane value and the parents who voted in a congress/president that made these student loans insanely available to anyone who asks.

I don't have a problem with the government supporting student loans, but this should be done as a rational business transaction based on a suitably modified ability to repay/public need. so, a loan for medical school is ok, a loan for wymyns studies is not.

Sports Cheating ...

I wouldn't worry about this. golf has a culture of extreme honesty, so players are expected to and do confess their sins. NASCAR has its thunder road roots where cheating is expected and only rarely punished severely. the NFL is trying to rebrand itself so these punishments are part of its marketing strategy. college football? no one believes its an amateur game.