Once again, the first Monday in October has brought another term at the U.S. Supreme Court. And once again, the Court has taken up questions of constitutional and statutory law that deeply affect the lives of all Americans.
As the new term proceeds, it’s a useful time to consider "judicial activism," and what this charge means. For years, we’ve heard about liberal judicial activism, a term leveled by conservatives so repeatedly that it is now in the common parlance, but without any clear meaning. For some, "judicial activism" applies to any decision that fails to meet conservative political purposes, but never to a decision that meets conservative goals, no matter how many acts of Congress it strikes down, how many prior decisions it overturns or how recklessly it strains to decide broad questions of constitutional law.
