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I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure I see your point. The plaintiffs in Lawrence had a harm to bring a case over: they really were charged with sodomy. Is your assertion that the facts of the case didn't support the charge so it was dishonest of them to take a legal strategy of "that shouldn't be illegal" instead of "we didn't do that"? (I don't know, maybe they did try the "we didn't do that" line of defense in a lower court and failed? I can't imagine a case based on the word of a few gay men vs. the word of police officer eyewitnesses going well for the gay men.)
That seems different from the claim that no gay marriage website was ever ordered, so the whole case was actually about a hypothetical harm, which I thought was grounds for throwing a case out, as otherwise the courts would be flooded with hypotheticals and they already have trouble keeping up with the concrete cases.
Reading up about the Lawrence case before, it is the same general idea as Roe vs Wade or the Scopes Monkey Trial: the popular view of what went on is not the actual truth. Both sides in Scopes agreed to the trial, the prosecution because they wanted a test case on teaching evolution in school and the defence because they hoped a big public trial would attract national attention and revive the town's flagging fortunes, so the teacher agreed to be prosecuted:
When Roe vs Wade went to trial, Norma McCorvey had already had the baby and the lawyers were using her as the test case for the real plaintiffs:
There's a lot going on when the sausage is being made that the public never see or know about!
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Not when the plaintiff is seeking an injunction, and can show a likelihood of future injury:
Kenny v. Wilson, 885 F. 3d 280 (4th Cir 2018)
That was not my layman's understanding of "standing", so thanks for the reference.
I've definitely seen people on the left complain about the difficulty/time it takes to get a test case through the courts for things like the recent abortion restrictions in various states. I wonder if this will lead to the left trying to use the same legal tactic to challenge those laws faster (and how that will go for them). Or maybe they already are and it's just not covered.
I am pretty sure that was the basis for the recent successful challenges to "drag ban" laws. And it certainly was re the injunction re the "Stop WOKE Act." Re abortion restrictions, I would think that it would be easy enough to find someone who is pregnant and wants an abortion.
I could see that being difficult because there's no possibility of the case being resolved fast enough to matter for the plaintiff.
A plaintiff can get a court order pretty quickly in such cases. This suit was filed on June 25, 2022, and a temporary restraining order was issued on June 27.
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To the extent that I have a point at all, it's that the jurisprudence of homosexuality--and perhaps, we might infer, many other things--is substantially fictive. I think many people are suspicious of forum shopping, fewer are aware of plaintiff shopping but people do seem to be a bit suspicious of that, too. Most people are aware of civil disobedience, though, and don't necessarily think of it as problematic, even though it does involve ginning up a case rather than addressing the law from a position of organic (so to speak) social interaction. I do think CNN's "just asking questions" article is too coy by half, but as I noted in another reply, I don't have any serious objections to how these cases turned out. Just--if you're (the general you, not you personally) going to raise doubts about one SCOTUS case based on its loose connection to real events, you might not like where that leads (or, more likely, you're just engaged in isolated demands for rigor).
While I don't think SCOTUS mentioned the "chilling effects" doctrine in 303 Creative, the Court has long recognized that the law does actual, rather than hypothetical, harm in cases where the law is clearly intended to "eliminate disfavored ideas" (p. 25).
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