You are under a misapprehension that &quot;naked exercise of personal power&quot; means a judge upholding a law he doesn&#x27;t like, when actually it means a judge unilaterally choosing not to uphold that law and substituting his own personal opinion instead.<p>That&#x27;s not to say that I&#x27;m a fan of our current legal system; I&#x27;m not. It is highly unfair and does a very poor job of getting justice done. But it&#x27;s still better than what we would have if everybody could disobey all laws they didn&#x27;t like with impunity. (If people disobey laws and then take the consequences, that&#x27;s different--if the judge had refused to impose the sentence required by law, and then had accepted being fired for failing to uphold the law, that would be civil disobedience, and sometimes that&#x27;s necessary. But that&#x27;s not what you&#x27;re advocating, as far as I can tell.)