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Justiciability A justiciable dispute is one that is appropriate for judicial resolution. Does the issue fall under the jurisdiction of the court writing the opinion? Does the court think that the issue is best left to the legislature to decide? In the drug policy context the considerations above tend to illuminate attitudes of excerpts' authors regarding the particular issues being ruled upon.
I agree that the separation of powers doctrine relates only to the allocation of power between the Branches, not the allocation of power within a single Branch. But this conclusion by no means suggests that the Constitution as a whole is indifferent to how permissibly delegated powers are distributed within the Executive Branch. In particular, the Due Process Clause limits the extent to which prosecutorial and other functions may be combined in a single actor. See, e. g., Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U.S. 471, 485-487, 33 L. Ed. 2d 484, 92 S. Ct. 2593 (1972).
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Lest readers expect the holding of this case to be extended to any other case, the Court notes that the drug test here is not a part of a medical examination designed to provide certification of a candidate's general health. [...] It is all but inconceivable that a case involving that sort of requirement could be decided differently than the present case; the same sort of urinalysis would be involved. The only possible basis for distinction is to say that the State has a far greater interest in the candidate's "general health" than it does with respect to his propensity to use illegal drugs. But this is the sort of policy judgment that surely must be left to legislatures, rather than being announced from on high by the Federal Judiciary.
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Entrusted within its sphere to make policy judgments, the Commission may abandon its old methods in favor of what it has deemed a more desirable "approach" to calculating LSD quantities ... We, however, do not have the same latitude to forsake prior interpretations of a statute. True, there may be little in logic to defend the statute's treatment of LSD; it results in significant disparity of punishment meted out to LSD offenders relative to other narcotics traffickers. (Although the number of doses petitioner sold seems high, the quantities of other narcotics a defendant would have to sell to receive a comparable sentence under the statute yield far more doses, see United States v. Marshall, 908 F.2d 1312, 1334 (CA7 1990) (Posner, J., dissenting), aff'd sub nom. Chapman v. United States, 500 U.S. 453, 114 L. Ed. 2d 524, 111 S. Ct. 1919 (1991).) Even so, Congress, not this Court, has the responsibility for revising its statutes. Were we to alter our statutory interpretations from case to case, Congress would have less reason to exercise its responsibility to correct statutes that are thought to be unwise or unfair.
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