{"id":1042,"date":"2004-08-26T15:13:58","date_gmt":"2004-08-26T23:13:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/08\/26\/activist-judges\/"},"modified":"2004-08-26T15:13:58","modified_gmt":"2004-08-26T23:13:58","slug":"activist-judges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1042","title":{"rendered":"Activist Judges"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, David Blankenhorn at the Family Scholars Blog <\/a>took umbrage at this sentence in a Times <\/i>op-ed<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The San Francisco decision — which somehow drew no new conservative outcries against “activist judges”– should be seen as but a bump on the way to progress.<\/div>\n

David resents the implication “that opponents of SSM view any <\/i>decision that they like as proper, and any <\/i>decision that they don’t like as the work of ‘activist judges.'” Instead, David claims, “To get called an ‘activist judge,’ you have to try (for whatever reason) to substitute a court’s decision for a legislature’s decision.”<\/p>\n

If David were correct – that judges who “for whatever reason” substitute their judgement for a legislature’s are called “activist” – then the same conservatives who called Goodridge <\/i> (the Massachusetts decision in favor of gay marriage) “judicial activism” would also be criticizing decisions like Boy Scouts of America v. Dale <\/a>(which substituted the Court’s decision for that of the New Jersey legislature’s), United States v. Morrison<\/a> (which invalidated parts of the Violence Against Women Act), United States v. Lopez (which invalidated the Gun Free School Zones Act), Printz v. United States <\/a>(which invalidated the Brady Gun Bill), Alabama v. Garrett (invalidating parts of the Americans with Disabilities Act), Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents (invalidating parts of the Age and Discrimination in Employment Act), and so on and so on.<\/p>\n

All of these are examples of “substitut[ing] a court’s decision for a legislature’s decision.” All of them are decisions that favored Conservative political preferences. None <\/i>of them have been derided by conservatives as “judicial activism.” Clearly, David is mistaken in his analysis of what “judcial activism” means. (For the record, I’m not saying David is writing in bad faith, just that he’s in error).<\/p>\n

Personally, I think the definition that David inferred from the Times <\/i>is more on the mark: a “judicial activist” decision is one that conservatives disagree with. And that’s all the term means.<\/p>\n

RELATED: Lucia also posted a response to David’s post<\/a>, although she took a very different approach than I did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, David Blankenhorn at the Family Scholars Blog took umbrage at this sentence in a Times op-ed: The San Francisco decision — which somehow drew no new conservative outcries against “activist judges”– should be seen as but a bump … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-same-sex-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}