Is That Legal?

While HLS unfortunately shortshrifts the interesting concerns about "seperations of power" and "judicial legislating," the case poses an interesting question.

The First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, amongst others, serve as a substantial principle in the United States that the interests of minorities often get trampled due to the majoritarian nature of democracies and therefore set limits on the power of democracies. In that light, we can read some of the criminal protections - the 4th, 5th, and 6th, and 8th Amendments - as protections against another "interest" that majoritarian democracies will almost uniformly fail to appreciate - that of criminal defendants and convicts.

This seems to be an offshoot of the case - preventing the legislature from using majoritarian principles from unfairly infringing against an interest group that the legislature has traditionally failed to sufficiently value. Should we be more upfront about that? And does this line of thinking have any "direct" impact on how we should view - and how judges should interpret - the constitutional rights of criminal defendants and convicts?