Judicial activism

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Judicial activism and revolution

If you want to perform a revolution, i.e. to fundamentally change the society and turn its values upside down, there are in essence three ways how to achieve for it: You can armor yourself and your friends and make and coup d'état attempt, a violent putsch as Bolsheviks did in 1917. This is however associated with putting your life at stake. The second option is to campaign before democratic elections in order to win the majority of voters, and then change the law in parliament. However, who has been in politics knows well how difficult it is to convince the public opinion. Last decades show that the easiest way to implement a revolution goes through the courts. You can only be a small group. You can even be completely alone. But if you have "your people" at the supreme court of the country, people who think like you, you have won. The court decides and the majority of citizens who firmly disagree with the ruling cannot help it. This is called judicial activism. Those who do not use napkins in front of their mouths speak also of judicial imperialism. — Vladimír Palko[1]

Undemocratic system of government
"A system of government that makes the people subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called democracy." — Justice Antonin Scalia[2]

Judicial activism is when courts do not confine themselves to reasonable interpretations of laws, but instead create law through judicial will. Alternatively, judicial activism is when courts do not limit their ruling to the dispute before them, but instead establish a new rule to apply broadly to issues not presented in the specific action. "Judicial activism" is when judges substitute their own political opinions for the applicable law, or when judges act like a legislature (legislating from the bench) rather than like a traditional court. In so doing, the court illegally takes for itself the powers of Congress, rather than limiting itself to the powers traditionally given to the judiciary.

Though reluctant to criticize themselves, courts have referenced the term "judicial activism" in 975 reported cases as of Oct. 6, 2020, including 399 federal court decisions and 554 state court decisions.

In this regard, judicial activism is a way for liberals to avoid the regular legislative means of enacting laws in order to ignore public opinion and dodge public debate. While originalist judges sometimes differ among themselves in specific court cases, left-wing judicial activists always vote in a way that advances left-wing policies, no matter how inconsistent they are.^[3][4]

The cradle of judicial activism is the USA.^[1] However, it is seen in many other countries, such as the UK^[5] and Israel, along with a large number of countries that legalized social taboos simply because of court actions.

Courts in California — both state and federal ones — frequently engage in judicial activism, invariably based on political ideology and personal feelings. One major example of this is the relatively recent California Supreme Court decision In re Marriage Cases, wherein four California Supreme Court justices (who are appointed, not elected) unilaterally overruled the will of the people of the state of California, and legalized same-sex "marriage". Proposition 22, which recognized the traditional definition of marriage had previously been put in place by a majority of California voters, but this did not deter the liberal judges of the court from acting. In response, a majority of California voters passed Proposition 8, which amended California's Constitution to uphold the sanctity of marriage, stemming the tide of the liberal homosexual assault on marriage before it was too late.

Judicial activism should not be confused with the courts' Constitutionally mandated rule in enforcing limitations on government power and preserving the Constitutional structure of government, as they did in Bush v. Gore, Boy Scouts v. Dale, and D.C. v. Heller, and as the Supreme Court of the United States should have done with ObamaCare.

Judicial activism rarely has a positive impact. Some cite Bolling v. Sharpe,^[6] the companion case to Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated schools in Washington, D.C. as an example of beneficial judicial activism. The Equal Protection Clause, which was cited in Brown, does not apply to the District of Columbia, only to the States. However, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregated schools in the city were still unconstitutional because it was also a violation of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. Although the impact was clearly desirable, the due process clause typically only applies to legal processes such as criminal trials, not to segregation. Also, the same result could have been achieved simply by an act of Congress, since they have control over the District's school system. Legal scholars Cass Sunstein and Randy Barnett agreed in a debate that it was hard to reconcile the ruling with the Constitution, in spite of its positive impact.^[7] These rare cases are considered to be among the hardest for the Supreme Court to decide.

History[edit]

The phrase "Judicial activism" was coined by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in an article he wrote for Fortune Magazine titled The Supreme Court: 1947.^[8]

The rise of judicial activism has coincided with the growing number of contentious and controversial judicial nominations in the U.S.^[9][10][11]

An example of judicial activism is the Left's support for court packing when conservatives are able to choose textualist and originalist judges.^[12]

Examples[edit]

• Griswold v. Connecticut — 1965 Supreme Court ruling establishing a constitutional right to possess, distribute and use contraception.
• Roe v. Wade — 1973 Supreme Court ruling claiming a constitutional "right" to abortion.^[13]
• Lawrence v. Texas — 2003 Supreme Court ruling claiming a constitutional "right" to sodomy.
• Obergefell v. Hodges — 2015 Supreme Court ruling claiming a constitutional "right" to same-sex "marriage".
• Bostock v. Clayton County — 2020 Supreme Court ruling reading homosexuality and gender confusion into the definition of "sex", as originally added into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a poison pill by Democrat senator Howard W. Smith in what was, at the time, an unsuccessful attempt to sabotage and defeat the proposed law, but was recently seized upon by the liberal SCOTUS judges and their LGBTQ allies to further force illegal imposition of homosexuality and gender confusion on the public.
• The Nicaraguan Supreme Court ruling allowing incumbent president Daniel Ortega to contest the 2011 election. The Nicaraguan Constitution forbids an individual from serving as president for more than two non-consecutive terms, disbarring Ortega from filing for reelection on both of these counts. Daniel Ortega, not willing to give up power, had the Sandinista-controlled Supreme Court overrule the current law as being in "violation" of human rights.^[14]
• The Israeli Supreme Court is known for making ideologically based decisions and issuing rulings in favor of the country's Left camp and against its opponents.^[15] Examples of this include forcing the Israelis government to recognize same-sex "marriages" performed abroad.^[16]
• In 2017, the Constitutional Tribunal of Chile partially lifted the country's ban on abortion.^[17]
• Democrats have used the courts to redraw district lines to favor their party and disfavor Republicans.^[18]
• Military Political Prisioners of Chile, sentenced in contravention of express norms of the Chilean Constitution and laws. These people have been persecuted for having fought, between 1973 and 1990, terrorists who tried to seize power and committed serious attacks against the military and the civilian population. The trials and sentences of the Military Political Prisioners are carried out under a Criminal Procedure System repealed for being an archaic system, typical of the Middle Ages, in which the same judge investigates, accuses, prosecutes and sentences. The new system came into force for all regions of the country in 2005. For all that years, all Chilean citizens have been subjected to a new Legal Procedure System that is denied to the Military Political Prisioners. These, since 2005, are subjected to arbitrary discrimination, which is absolutely forbidden in the Chilean Constitution, thus, constituing judicial activism against them.

Contract law[edit]

The Seventh Circuit has criticized as "judicial activism" an interpretation of a contract beyond its clear meaning. "Thus, when a contract is unambiguous, 'we refuse to indulge in judicial activism' by 'construing the [contract] beyond its clear and obvious language ....' See Heller v. Equitable Life Assurance Soc'y, 833 F.2d 1253, 1257 (7th Cir. 1987)." Grun v. Pneumo Abex Corp., 163 F.3d 411, 420 (7th Cir. 1998).

External links[edit]

• Tucker: Federal courts the most decayed institution of all, February 21, 2018.
• Chapter Ten: Using the Law for Evil, The Epoch Times (from How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World).
• Living Constitutionalism v. Originalism., by Timothy S. Goeglin and Craig Osten, Human Events, July 2, 2019.

See also[edit]

• Judicial Restraint
• Judicial supremacy
• United States Supreme Court
• Sonia Sotomayor
• Elena Kagan
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Stephen Breyer
• Anthony Kennedy
• Living Constitution
• Government by Judiciary

References[edit]

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