First, here is my answer to my own question:  No.  Our current assemblage of nine justices is not needed at all, in spite of their efforts to convince us that we simply cannot survive as decent and civilized individuals without them.  I take the opposite position; namely, that these justices are more aligned with the problem than they are with the solution.   

That raises the question “What is the problem?”  The problem is this:  “How can we best assure that every resident of this country has a reasonable chance of finding justice in his or her life?” We know this much:  We do not have it now, nor is there any prospect that we will find it at any future date.   

The main reason why our Supreme Court cannot help toward realizing a just society is because these honorable men and women do not see that objective as their main purpose for existing as a deliberative body.  No, they are not in search of justice for anyone, rather, they seek only to examine the past 227 years of legal documents in search of meanings.  To help in their efforts they each have staffs of legal aids to classify, file, sort, compare, and correlate words, and courts, and decisions; while seeking word origins, their meanings, their changing meanings, how they link or do not link together in a linear flow of trials and tribulations in their search to discover the extent to which an issue before them can be identified with something contained in our Constitution that has some connection to their biased notions of how we all should behave and who will benefit from their decisions.   

Perhaps I have not stated their tasks with the nuanced accuracy that they or their staffs might state them, but this much I know:  There is nothing in how they go about their jobs or in their decisions that the typical American can relate to as having anything to do with justice.  And come to think of it, there is nothing in their activities that those of us who are intimately familiar with words, and language, and meanings; and who can think, analyze, assimilate, and reach good decisions can relate to justice.   

And that opens this essay to this question:  What is the difference between justice and the Constitution?   

The Constitution is a collection of laws and rights treated as though they contain something very close to the immutable truth.  In realty, in spite of its brevity, the Constitution is a restricted collection of laws and rights that are vague, poorly written, that deals with a snapshot of life that existed 227 years ago, that has limited application today, and that does not deal with perhaps 95 percent of life as we know it today.  To seek meanings and justice within it is tantamount to searching for life on the moon.  It is perhaps a laudable venture in the abstract, but we know before starting such a search that it will be expensive, time consuming, and it will end with our finding no life there at all. 

Justice is a different matter altogether.  It can be described by our four founding virtues:  Equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  We need only define each of those terms, and ask whether any given dispute violates any of them.  If it does, it is unjust.  If it does not, it is just.  Moreover, the judges need only have a good understanding of the definitions and a clear understanding of the arguments pro and con.  Ordinary citizens, sound of mind, devoid of ill intentions, and free of criminal convictions could service as judges.   Such a streamlined set of procedures would put a large segment of lawyers out of business, but how could that be a bad thing? 

Equality issues that might come before our Ordinary Citizen panel would include actions by Congress or any legislative body that favor the rich over the poor such as educational opportunities, or health care, or military service.  Other actions that diverted wealth and income from the majority and directed them to the top would arguably deprive those who were disadvantaged of the opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.   

In support of my position I call upon William of Occam, and 14the century philosopher and theologian who gave us this rule of logic that has stood the test of time:  "When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better."   I will submit that relying on a panel of citizens in deciding issues that relate to justice in terms of our four core values is far simpler and more certain than relying on a pool of tens of thousand of lawyers channeling their efforts into the hands of nine Supreme Court justices in taking years, decades, and perhaps never in relating issues of today to a document from 1789, and then answering but a thin slice of the issue, thence to be argued again and again, rarely ever resolving anything—not as it relates to justice, but the extent to which today’s words have meaning when juxtaposed with similar words from 1789.    

I also call upon Galileo Galilei from the 17^th century who left us this sparkling insight to reason and to human understanding:  “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason and intellect intended us to forego their use.”