Well, condescention was not exactly my intention - apologies if you construed it as such.
You have already
>conceded the key point, that most law is not politics, and do not threaten
>the interests of key power brokers. Nor indeed are all the ones that do (a
>tiny minority) decided in their interests. And even of that minority those
I think you are somehow missing the point of my argument. The point is not whether the majority or decisions are politically driven, but what is the probability of being politically driven when they threaten the entrenched interests, which by definition involves only a samll number of cases. To illustrate with an example, homicide or industrial pollution account for only a tiny minority of all deaths in this country, but that does not necessarily mean they are not a serious problem. To demonstrate their danger all we need to do is to show that under certain circumstances the probablity of being poisoned or shot is quite high. Likewise, I argued that under certain circumstances, court decisions in this country are likely to be politically motivated. I do not think anyone can seriously challenge that statement.
The only valid argument to defend the US justice system from charges of being subservient to political expediency would be to compare it to other countries and show that, ceteris paribus, our judiciary is less susceptible to political expediency than elsewhere. Ceteris paribus is of key importance here to avoid comparisons to systems that openly reject the idea of independent courts (e.g. Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia).
I do not know what the results of such a comparison will be. Jean Christophe (to whose post I originally replied) suggested that France scores better than the US in this respect. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of comparative law can do a more systematic evaluation.
wojtek