One of my classmates sits on the Supreme Court. The thought brings me chills .... but only because the Court is viewed by everyone as a super-legislature in all cultural matters. Were the Court limited to its proper bounds, I wouldn't at all be troubled by its comprising mainly Ivy League graduates.
Its proper bounds are juridical. Why should the justices now be hearing arguments about when human life begins? Of course it begins at conception, but that's not my point. The point is that this is information required by a LEGISLATURE, which has been invested with the responsibility to hear from a wide variety of people, with their various fields of expertise, their points of view, their experiences, and their best guesses as to the probable cultural or economic results of this or that proposed piece of legislation. Why have legislatures at all, if the most important cultural questions are taken from their purview and handed over to the Nine Archons?
Thomas Aquinas says that a law cannot be a just law unless it is declared by the proper authority. What a wall of realism that Dumb Ox was! A law may be just in its form and its intent and its probable effects, but still NOT a just law if it is not declared by the person or the body of persons with the authority to declare it. What we then do with a not-just law is another question. Here Thomas distinguishes between obedience and compliance. It is not always a good thing to disobey an unjust law. You may make matters worse by disobedience. As long as the law does not demand that you do something wicked, or prohibit you from fulfilling an absolute moral duty, you may comply with it, though you do not obey it; that is, you do not heed it, you do not make it an internal principle of action. You comply, while you oppose. But you understand also that compliance is out of the question if the law compels an evil or prohibits a necessary good, as I've said.
The reason why Aquinas insists upon proper authority is that otherwise there is no real polity, but disorder, and the common good slips from our grasp. Imagine an umpire who has departed from his legitimate sphere, and instead puts his thumb on the scales to profit a good person and penalize a bad person. He is not a bad umpire. He is no umpire at all....