Following up in the few minutes before I stop looking at a computer today, if I could distill American legal thinking and judicial opinions to four concepts, I think these are they:
1) We need reliable evidence, not people's opinions (hooray for the British common law for this one).
2) We need clearly understandable rules.
3) Whatever the source of the rule, there is a point at which enforcing it becomes absurd. So we look for a way to define that point (and the more we trust the source of the rule, i.e., the more democratic it is, the more absurd the outcome has to be for us to reject the rule.)
4) Our written constitutions (federal and state) set out the framework for determining who gets to set the rules, and what the limits of those rules are. But even the constitutions are limited to avoid the absurd.
