Thread:Comments:High Court of Australia dismisses appeal against conviction, compulsory voting/Consideration of "human rights" requires conviction/reply (7)

In fairness, though, it does get messier than that. It's just a fact that a court of last resort can make mistakes. The messiness is that "last resort" is only an approximation &mdash; usually a very good approximation, hence the term "last resort". Where do you turn once the court of last resort has decided? At that point, the alternatives are all things that would have seemed too slim to mention before the decision; simple theory breaks down into a clutter of special cases that are too infrequent to make broad statements about. Broadly, one looks for a way to either convince the court of last resort to change its decision (this could take decades or centuries to achieve), or somehow override or bypass the court of last resort by some other channel. Or some strange blend of the two. Holmdahl has in mind to appeal to the UN Human Rights Council; if successful, that would be an interesting way to try for some political traction (though whether one uses that traction legislatively or judicially, or both, I'm not sure).

[Postscript: I'm amused by the way my own phrasing comes out saying you can't make broad statements and then explicitly making a broad statement. Hopefully, that's oxymoronic rather than self-contractory.]