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Comment by gwright | Hacker News Reader

Your comment illustrates the problem. Do you think that everyone agrees that "activist" means "hunting for cases"? What does "hunting for cases" actually mean?

The term "activist" is often interpreted as "legislating from the bench" where the judiciary usurps the role of the legislature. Some people actually want that. Other people don't want that.

Refusing to solve a problem and instead requiring Congress to clarify the law is another judicial philosophy. Is that being an activist?

Deciding that the federal government has no authority and that state authority or individual rights are more paramount is also a course of action that some people agree with and some people don't. Supporters probably don't call that "activism" but detractors might.

So I think the term is mainly used to slur your political opponent as opposed to being a succinct term for some particular judicial philosophy.

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Their politics comes first the "judicial philosophy" is fake and is bent to fit the political outcome they want.

This is just stating an opinion that you disagree with the philosophy. Do you think leftist judges also don't have a philosophy but just aim for outcomes?

There is no philosophy, it's just partisan politics. Some examples,

They are supposedly "originalist" except in their 2nd amendment rulings they ignore "A well regulated Militia" because guns is a Republican religion.

In banning Biden's student relief they ignored the text of the law and legislated from the bench just saying that it was unfair because the size was too "significant". Activism.

Last year they invented out of thin air the "major questions doctrine" to override the Clean Air Act and help polluters. Activism.

In 2022, without citing any principle, they said OSHA couldn't protect workers from covid. Activism.

When they gutted the Voting Rights Act they invented an "equal dignity of the states" doctrine. Activism.

To conservatives judicial activism is only a problem when liberals do it.

I don't feel strongly about "activism" being inherently good or bad (and don't agree with all of the outcomes in those cases) but I think your reasoning isn't great. For example:

> In banning Biden's student relief they ignored the text of the law and legislated from the bench just saying that it was unfair because the size was too "significant". Activism.

I think the majority opinion explains this quite clearly: > The HEROES Act, Roberts emphasized, gives the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify” laws and regulations governing the student-loan programs. Congress’s use of the word “modify” means that the Biden administration can make “modest adjustments and additions to existing provisions,” Roberts wrote, “not transform them.” But the debt-relief program, Roberts stressed, instead “created a novel and fundamentally different loan forgiveness program.” The plan “modifies” student-loan laws and regulations, Roberts suggested, “only in the same sense that the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility — it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely.” (from scotusblog)

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