Everyone knows I'm not a scholar. But it certainly appears that judges are (and have been for a while) considered "triers of fact", at least when a jury's not available. Of course, what they really mean is something more akin to Jon's pursuit of models (or whatever it is I *think* Jon's doing 8^D). What the judge (or jury) ends up doing is choosing the perspective/facet/frame/model for whatever blame/consequences should ensue. Whether that perspective is unitary (like the modernists, monists, universal-logic advocates, etc. would have us believe) or not may be a bit untethered. But "fact" in this language refers to an attempt at parallax and to land on the "largest model" or perhaps the most fit-to-purpose model of the given scoped context.
But Justices (vaguely referring to judges in "higher" courts) might be another matter. It seems to me like it's their job to reconcile "lower" courts' frame selections ... to unify all the frames into the One True Frame, maybe analogous to physical GUTs. To my mind, the Justices would be even less tethered than the judges. Justices are metadata peddlers, always yapping on about (often falsely ... "biasedly"?) *derived* data, almost never about the "raw" data of some given context. As we realized with software awhile back, there is no difference between data and code ... between the facts and the law. Law is fact and fact is law. To separate the two naively can be problematic. On 9/28/24 17:09, Prof David West wrote:
Judges should decide law, not facts. With one exception, I see no instances of SCOTUS doing otherwise. The exception is the very recent assumption that judges can determine the 'facts' of history and the feeble attempt to ground decisions of law in those 'facts'.
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