On Judicial Restraint

(Also from The Federalist Patriot)

You gotta love him:


You talk about independence [of the judiciary] as though it is unquestionably and unqualifiably a good thing. It may not be. It depends on what your courts are doing. The more your courts become policy-makers, the less sense it makes to have them entirely independent... Take the abortion issue: Whichever side wins, in the courts, the other side feels cheated. I mean, you know, there’s something to be said for both sides. The court could have said, ‘No, thank you.’ The court have said, ‘You know, there is nothing in the Constitution on the abortion issue for either side.’ It could have said the same thing about suicide, it could have said the same thing about... all the social issues the courts are now taking... It is part of the new philosophy of the Constitution, and when you push the courts into that, and when they leap into it, they make themselves politically controversial. And that’s what places their independence at risk.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia