Legal Activism Quotes

If Americans loved judicial activism, liberals wouldn't be lying about what it is. Judicial activism means making up constitutional rights in order to strike down laws the justices don't like based on their personal preferences. It's not judicial activism to strike down laws because they violate the Constitution.

Galvanised into action by the second trial, I was determined to change Britain's archaic sex laws.

Activist judges and local officials in some parts of the country are not letting up in their efforts to redefine marriage for the rest of America-and neither should defenders of traditional marriage flag in their efforts.

Ideological warriors whether from the Left or the Right are bad news for the bench. They tend to make law, not interpret law. And that's not what any of us should want from our judges.

What Richard and Mildred Loving did was, by their nature, not by any calculus, they separated themselves from the political conversation. They did not have an agenda. They did not want to be martyrs. They did not want to be symbols of a movement.

My life and the life of my family has been completely disrupted in absolutely every way by starting the school-prayer case. But it's been worth it. It's uncovered a vast cesspool of illegitimate economic and political power in which the Church is immersed right up to its ears, and I intend to dive in headfirst and pull it out of there dripping wet for all the world to see -no matter how long it takes, no matter whose feet get stepped on in the process, no matter how much it costs, no matter how great the personal sacrifice.

Anytime we're talking about Thurgood Marshall, that's a good thing, I think, because it gives us an opportunity to go back, look at the history, and recognize what his contributions were.

A great many college graduates come here thinking of lawyers as social engineers arguing the great Constitutional issues.

There's a black lawyer in Galveston, Texas, who was the unpaid NAACP general counsel in Texas. He had a great record in housing discrimination, labor discrimination. He decided to take as a client a member of the Ku Klux Klan because the state wanted to get the membership lists of the Klan to find out if they could get something on the Klan. And he said, 'I got to take you. I despise you. But we, the NAACP, won that case; NAACP vs. Alabama in the 1950s. Nobody has the right to get your membership lists.' He was fired from the NAACP. To me, he's a hero.

I don't advocate civil disobedience. I do advocate the role of an informed citizen to try to overturn when a court makes a mistake and gets an issue wrong.

If you want to call me an activist attorney general, I will proudly accept that label.

Any attorney general who is not an activist is not doing his or her job.

Anything I could have done that was legal to get Margaret Thatcher's government out I was prepared to do. I could not believe what she was doing to this country.