Can you win a lawsuit accusing the Legislature of doing a lousy job?

Can you win a lawsuit that accuses the Florida Legislature of doing a lousy job?

Just such a claim was filed last week in Tallahassee by citizens unhappy with Florida's education system.

Here's the theory. Our state Constitution says that Florida is supposed to provide "high-quality education." We are supposed to have "a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools."

What's more, our Constitution (as the voters amended it in 1998) says education is the state's "paramount duty."

The lawsuit says that we have failed, and that the courts should order the Legislature to fix it. The suit quotes many figures and claims:

• The state has cut its share of school spending for years, forcing counties to raise their own taxes to keep up.

• We rank low in per-student spending and low in teacher salaries.

• We aren't "safe" — we rank high in assaults, bullying, threats on teachers, drug use and weapons on campus.

• We rank low in graduation rates, test scores and the performance of minority, low-income and disabled students.

• We abuse standardized tests such as the FCAT to the point of hurting education instead of helping.

"By a variety of measures," the lawsuit concludes, "defendants have breached their paramount duty."

Let's say that every claim in the lawsuit is true.

There's still a good question: Can the courts really order the Legislature to do better?

"Paramount duty." "High quality." Our Constitution contains all kinds of nice, puffy, rhetorical flourishes.

Our Constitution also happens to say that our state's policy is to protect our "natural resources and scenic beauty." Taking those words literally, couldn't they be used to challenge every road and development in Florida?

More rhetoric: The Constitution says that all Floridians deserve to be "rewarded for industry." It says that every political candidate has the right to "compete effectively." Can anybody not properly "rewarded for industry" sue? What about a candidate who did not "compete effectively"?

If you have a long memory, you might remember we have fought this fight before. In a similar case in 1996, the Florida Supreme Court refused to second-guess the Legislature's spending on schools, saying that would be imposing the court's "value judgments."

Back then, the Constitution only required "adequate" money for schools. Two years later we amended the Constitution to make "high-quality" education a "paramount duty" of the state. The plaintiffs hope that makes a difference.

Maybe they'll win.

Maybe the weight of statistics will convince the courts, as in the famous U.S. Supreme Court ruling on pornography, that they know "high quality" when they (don't) see it.

But this will require an extraordinary act of judicial activism. Writing the school budget each year could become a two-step process: The Legislature passes it; the courts review it to make sure it is "high quality."

If our Legislature is hostile to education, it is still the Legislature elected by the people of Florida. To be sure, our election system is biased by campaign money loopholes and rigged voting districts. If we addressed those factors, we might have a different Legislature.

But that is hard. To an extent, filing a lawsuit like this is asking the courts to do the work of democracy for us.