judicial activism

judicial activism, an approach to the exercise of judicial review, or a description of a particular judicial decision, in which a judge is generally considered more willing to decide constitutional issues and to invalidate legislative or executive actions. Although debates over the proper role of the judiciary date to the founding of the American republic, the phrase judicial activism appears to have been coined by the American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in a 1947 article in Fortune. Although the term is used quite frequently in describing a judicial decision or philosophy, its use can cause confusion, because it can bear several meanings, and even if speakers agree on which meaning is intended, they will frequently not agree on whether it correctly describes a given decision. (Compare judicial restraint.)

The term activism is used in both political rhetoric and academic research. In academic usage activism usually means only the willingness of a judge to strike down the action of another branch of government or to overturn a judicial precedent, with no implied judgment as to whether the activist decision is correct or not. Activist judges enforce their own views of constitutional requirements rather than deferring to the views of other government officials or earlier courts. Defined in this way, activism is simply the antonym of restraint. It is not pejorative, and studies suggest that it does not have a consistent political valence. Both liberal and conservative judges may be activist in this sense, though conservative judges have been more likely to invalidate federal laws and liberals more likely to strike down those of the states.

In political rhetoric activism is used as a pejorative. To describe judges as activist in this sense is to argue that they decide cases on the basis of their own policy preferences rather than a faithful interpretation of the law, thus abandoning the impartial judicial role and “legislating from the bench.” Decisions may be labeled activist either for striking down legislative or executive action or for allowing it to stand. In the early 21st century one of the most-criticized Supreme Court decisions in the United States was in Kelo v. City of New London (2005), in which the court allowed the city to exercise its eminent domain power to transfer property from homeowners to a private developer. Because judges may be called activist for either striking down government action or permitting it (in Kelo they permitted it) and because activism in political usage is always considered wrongful, this sense of activism is not the antonym of restraint.

A judicial decision may also be called activist in a procedural sense if it resolves a legal issue unnecessary to the disposition of the case. A disputed example of alleged extreme procedural activism is the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which ultimately struck down provisions of federal election law that had limited corporate and union spending on political advertisements. Following oral arguments, the Court called for reargument of the case on the basis of new questions, because it foresaw that a correct ruling on the questions originally presented would have left the provisions in place and frustrated its conviction that “this corporation [Citizens United] has a constitutional right to speak on this subject.” Procedural activism is generally considered improper at the federal level in the United States and in countries that follow the U.S. system (e.g., Kenya and New Zealand) on the grounds that the function of courts is to resolve concrete disputes between adverse parties, not to issue legal pronouncements in the abstract. However, in states that follow other systems (e.g., Austria, France, Germany, South Korea, Spain, and some U.S. states), courts are permitted to decide issues in the absence of disputes or adverse parties.

Complaints about activism have arisen in most countries where courts exercise significant judicial review, particularly within common-law systems (e.g., at the federal levels in Australia, Canada, and India). Although in the U.S. context allegations of activism have been raised more recently by conservatives than liberals, such charges can be deployed by both sides, and the primary determinant is probably where the courts stand politically with respect to other government actors. In the first half of the 20th century, the Supreme Court tended to be more conservative than legislatures and was criticized by liberals for striking down progressive economic legislation (notably elements of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal) on the basis of the justices’ supposed free-market views. In the second half of the 20th century, especially under Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953–69), the Supreme Court was frequently more liberal than Congress and state legislatures and tended to be criticized by conservatives for striking down state and federal laws on the basis of the justices’ supposed liberal politics. In the early 21st century, the Supreme Court tacked back to the conservative side and was criticized for striking down laws such as campaign finance reform (see Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission).

Since neither conservatives nor liberals claim that judicial decisions should be based on politics rather than law, the debate over judicial activism does not take the form of arguments for and against. Instead, each side accuses the other of activism while denying that they themselves engage in it. However, the persistent difference of opinion among scholars and judges as to how the Constitution should be interpreted makes it difficult to demonstrate that any decision in a controversial case is the product of politics rather than law. In consequence, calling a decision activist serves primarily to indicate the speaker’s belief that those on the other side are not operating in good faith.