Comment by azinman2
1 year ago
The Federalist Society, a political entity to alter the judicial branch, picked Neil Gorsuch while grooming many other federal judges who are then put in place by politicians. If you were put in place by activists, doesn’t that make you an activist judge?
Now you are just pushing "activist" towards meaning "having a legal philosophy". And in practice it means having the wrong legal philosophy with respect to the person who labels you an "activist" as opposed to having a particular philosophy.
It isn't a particularly useful term because no one agrees on what it means. This has been illustrated quite nicely by the comments to my original comment.
No. Particularly when one of the primary goals of that activism is to produce judges who aren't activists:
> [The Federalist Society] is founded on the principles that [...] it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.
https://fedsoc.org/about-us
“What the law is, not what it should be” is code for a particular viewpoint on how to rule itself, which is activism.
If everything is "activism" then nothing is "activism".
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You and I clearly have different ideas of what constitutes judicial activism. What would you consider to be "non-activist" then, if ruling based on what the law says rather than on your personal politics is itself activist?
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