Activist?

Through a long winding trail of articles and links, I came across this blog of a law professor who has a comment about Alito. Apparently some documents have come to light where Alito expressly states that the Constitution does not permit abortion.

Abortion is not at the top of my priority list, but it is significant in that it is central in the "values" war. It's really not a battle we can afford to lose, and it does appear that the popular opinion is on the pro-choice side.

The start of my reading was a post here about the "Constitution in exile". It's rather odd when you consider the breadth and scope of how movements try to affect the direction of constitutional law over a period of many decades.

Why do they care? None of them live that long...

Second, there is the question of how personal beliefs affect a judge's performance on the bench. Some will defend Alito by saying a good judge is a humble, faithful servant of the law who sets his personal, political beliefs aside. Related to this is one of Bush's big issues: the liberal judges are activist judges who make the law mean what they would vote for if they were legislators. In this rhetoric, the conservative judges somehow escape the temptation the liberal judges succumb to. As long as you have a conservative judge, the rhetoric goes, you don't have to worry about what his political beliefs are: He will do the proper, judicial thing and not "legislate from the bench" like those bad liberal judges. Those of us who are not political ideologues tend to think that judges try to follow the law, but that the texts and precedents are ambiguous or fluid enough to require some judgment to get to a decision. Thus, the background beliefs and political tendencies of any judge will need to flow into the decision-making, no matter how modest and dutiful the human being making the decision is.

She essentially states the obvious. It's not about conservative or liberal, the whole "activist" term is nothing but a straw man.

I surely wish the right wing would stop using that term. They only make themselves sound stupid, which they surely are - but that's another story entirely..

One other observation - I often feel shall we say, less than intellectual, when reading about issues of politics and law. It take solace that I'm reading outside my field, and while I get the gist of it, there are concepts of law that are really difficult to grasp.

There are mysteries and movements, every last one I know about relates to a conservative agenda. Is there such a thing on the left? Does the ACLU count when it's not nearly as mysterious as the conservative groups? Prior to Bush, did anyone know what "neocon" meant?

There is a reason why many politicians are lawyers. Politics and law are intertwined - which is a really scary thing when you think about it.