In the vein of the Durham Report quotes

I am in the process of skimming through a book, The Least Examined Branch: The Role of Legislatures in the Constitutional State, on the roles of legislatures in constitutional democracies when I came across the following passage in the forward:

This distinction between judicial and legislative roles is not therefore between principle and policy, because both institutions can and should act in principled ways. It is rather between ruling narrowly and legislating broadly, whether the rulings are a matter of principle or policy. This distinction is fundamental to understanding the difference between how courts and legislatures are typically designed to work and how they work best in supporting a constitutional democracy. Legislatures most often make egregious mistakes when they try to rule on single, high-visibility cases for politically expedient purposes. Courts correspondingly most often make egregious mistakes when they rule in ways that go far beyond what can be confidently inferred from the merits of the actual case or cases at hand.

I think that this is probably a pretty good way of thinking about the respective roles of legislatures and the judiciary. I am a little embarrassed that I hadn't explicitly thought about such distinctions before now.

Edit: The more I think about it the more I realize that this perspective is a little ahistorical, at least in the Canadian/Westminister tradition. Private Bills, for quite a while, were a major component of the legislature's work. And I can't help but think that issues relating to the setting of precedents are reasonably somewhat relevant to the rulings passed down by the judiciary.

Maybe my early excitement was a bit hasty.