I have a short piece over at Commonweal on the issues of standing and justiciability in United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry. Here’s a little bit:

Yet the question of relevance persists: Even if lawyers and judges pay attention to standing, why should the public care about it, particularly when matters of equality, freedom, and civil rights are jostling for the limelight?

First, because less is more. The Supreme Court wields its power within the constitutional structure only as long as it also retains a firm sense of the limits of that power. When it exceeds those limits, it disrupts the constitutional order and threatens its own authority. As always, Tocqueville saw this clearly:

The political power which the Americans have intrusted to their courts of justice is therefore immense, but the evils of this power are considerably diminished by the obligation which has been imposed of attacking the laws through the courts of justice alone. If the judge had been empowered to contest the laws on the ground of theoretical generalities, if he had been enabled to open an attack or to pass a censure on the legislator, he would have played a prominent part in the political sphere; and as the champion or the antagonist of a party, he would have arrayed the hostile passions of the nation in the conflict.

Or, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it in his dissent in the DOMA case, a free-floating power to say what the law is would be “an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people’s representatives in Congress and the executive”—an unsustainable exercise of judicial force that risks destroying the constitutional separation of powers.

Second, it is we who have the primary duty to make the law. We are given that duty by the federal and state constitutions, each of which provides representative mechanisms for us to discharge our duty. But the duty remains ours, not the Supreme Court’s. Constitutions are collections of entrenched choices made by the people to obligate not only their representatives and officials, but also themselves. Justice Kennedy’s dissent in the Proposition 8 case likewise notes that California’s popular initiative system represents a choice by the people of the state about where to vest law-making authority. A people that has no time for justiciability is more likely to cede its law-making powers and duties. Eventually, it will not even remember what power it has surrendered. It will then have the judges it deserves.