Courts are criticized only when measured against idealized legislatures

Evidence

Evaluating Horowitz’s Critique Not all observers agree that courts are ill-equipped to devise policy.** The recent proliferation of remedial policymaking, they claim, shows that Horowitz underestimates courts’ ability to devise new approaches to deal with unfamiliar problems. They also insist that courts fare badly in Horowitz’s analysis because he unfairly compares the actual operation of courts to an idealized picture of legislatures and administrative agencies. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2878

Categorization

• XREF: Ties directly to the course theme of competing institutional framings of judicial competence and to the remedial-policymaking cases like Brown and the Alabama prisons.
• QUESTION: Is the comparative-institutional baseline (real courts vs. idealized legislatures) a sound method, or does it beg the question either way?