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You’re hopeless. And do you not understand the process? The plaintiff brings a lawsuit arguing that the defendant did a bad thing. They make multiple claims ab

by db48x 9d ago

You’re hopeless. And do you not understand the process? The plaintiff brings a lawsuit arguing that the defendant did a bad thing. They make multiple claims about laws that were broken. The judge may throw out any or all of those claims. Most lawsuits lose at least one. In this case one of the claims was that the municipal water district violated their 14th amendment rights. That one got thrown out. The plaintiffs appealed and the this is their appeal being denied. I haven’t actually read the original lawsuit, but there’s no way that they were dumb enough to make only that one claim against the water district. They’ll still have their claims about negligence and so on and so forth. It’ll go to trial eventually, or the district will settle. Losing this claim does not let the district escape their responsibility.

schoen 9d ago
When I worked at EFF, I read a lot of news coverage (and forum discussions) of litigation, sometimes including litigation that I was working on. It was often very hard to get people to see larger context about issues like * in the course of a court case, a judge (or multiple judges from multiple courts) are asked to make many different decisions on many different legal issues; most of those don't end or determine the outcome of the overall case * indeed, some of the decisions are about minor issues and others are about major issues * some of the issues presented in a case may be "questions of first impression" where no court has ever addressed them before; these are potentially very important as a matter of precedent because they might affect how similar questions are viewed in other cases * other issues may be very longstanding or familiar ones * lawyers may be willing to bring cases with different degrees of novelty (e.g. relying entirely on an untested theory, or not!), and with different likelihoods of success * legal standards will often have many different elements, and one party may lose under a standard even though it met most of the elements (but not all of them) All of these are more complex from the natural impulse to say "hooray, the court made a decision in favor of the people I think are the good guys!" or "boo, the court made a decision in favor of the people I think are the bad guys!".
- db48x 9d ago
  I don’t like it, but you’re probably right. It is evident that many commenters have treated this story as a catastrophe that proves that the government is out to get them rather than a temporary setback for the plaintiffs and the obvious consequence of a logical overreach.

by db48x 9d ago

schoen 9d ago

When I worked at EFF, I read a lot of news coverage (and forum discussions) of litigation, sometimes including litigation that I was working on. It was often very hard to get people to see larger context about issues like * in the course of a court case, a judge (or multiple judges from multiple courts) are asked to make many different decisions on many different legal issues; most of those don't end or determine the outcome of the overall case * indeed, some of the decisions are about minor issues and others are about major issues * some of the issues presented in a case may be "questions of first impression" where no court has ever addressed them before; these are potentially very important as a matter of precedent because they might affect how similar questions are viewed in other cases * other issues may be very longstanding or familiar ones * lawyers may be willing to bring cases with different degrees of novelty (e.g. relying entirely on an untested theory, or not!), and with different likelihoods of success * legal standards will often have many different elements, and one party may lose under a standard even though it met most of the elements (but not all of them) All of these are more complex from the natural impulse to say "hooray, the court made a decision in favor of the people I think are the good guys!" or "boo, the court made a decision in favor of the people I think are the bad guys!".

db48x 9d ago
I don’t like it, but you’re probably right. It is evident that many commenters have treated this story as a catastrophe that proves that the government is out to get them rather than a temporary setback for the plaintiffs and the obvious consequence of a logical overreach.