Thread:Comments:High Court of Australia dismisses appeal against conviction, compulsory voting/Consideration of "human rights" requires conviction/reply (10)

Reference: Wilkins, David E., American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court, http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/wilame

Mr. Wilkins quotes another legal scholar saying that judicial determination of issues is just another form of politics. But statements such as these are about what determines what the result of supreme adjudication is at any point in time. Analyzing the forces that produce the supreme adjudication does not change the institutional fact that the law is, at any moment in time, whatever a judge says that it is.

At any point in time, for any given issue, the law can be contradictory, simultaneously. Three different judges, or even the same judge, can decide an issue of law three different ways in three different cases. So even saying "the law" is an abstraction that ignores that there are issues of law that the courts are in the process of ruling on, through the maddeningly slow process of appellate review and scholarly commentary.

Today, at this moment, there is absolutely no question about what the law in Australia is for the defendant and appellant in this article. What the law should be, and how the law came to be what it is at this moment, are distinct questions.