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Although I'm generally in favor of more direct democracy, I must admit that there's something useful about the Supreme Court, because they really do seem to try to make decisions based on rationality and to respect the law as written (rather than as they would like it to be), much more than the other branches.
I think the main functions of judges are:
1) To interpret the laws If we had a computer that could read the laws and read the cases and tell us when someone had broken a law and when they hadn't, we wouldn't need the Justices for this (and, for this function, it would be better if a computer could do it, because then there wouldn't be this uncertainty; instead of consulting a lawyer to find out if something you want to do is legal, you could just run your copy of the Supreme Court Program and ask it). But computers aren't that smart yet.
(why do lower courts disagree then? because the English language contains ambiguity... which brings us to...)
2) To resolve ambiguity in the laws Well, someone's gotta decide. I suppose the Supreme Court Program could just flip a coin when it finds a situation that the law is ambiguous about, but that would be suboptimal because a human would often realize that one interpretation is obviously more "fair" than another
3) To serve as a "common sense check" on the legal system Even today, the law is a lot like computer code, and just like computer code, it sometimes contains bugs; often in the form of unintended interactions between individual laws (such as "unwinnable" bureacratic catch-22s; see some of the bureacratic problems in the movie Brazil for some funny examples, but there's plenty of real-world examples too). The judges are a last-ditch chance for a human to intervene in the system and say, "well, i guess that's what the law said, but that's obviously ridiculous so we'll ignore the law in this case".
Although the judges are qualified and well-placed to redesign the judicial system, and although they do this to an extent, that is mainly Congress's job.
Although they are in a sense the most "meta" of the branches of government, they are denied the power to autonomously redesign the system (that is, they have no legislative power), instead being limited to interpreting Congress's instructions and only inserting their own will "between the cracks" where the instructions are unclear or nonexistent.
In this sense, whereas the legislature might be thought of as imposing its will and telling people what to do, the Court is merely a subroutine deeply nested within the machinery of government.
Of course, this is not as true in practice as in theory, and the "cracks" turn out to be important sometimes, especially when the "will" of Congress is conflicted.
