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You want to know what judicial activism is? Judicial activism is judges imposing their policy preferences on the words of the Constitution.

A law is a law, and it has to be respected.

The ultimate relationship between justice and law will be an eternal subject for speculation and analysis. But it may be said that in a democratic society, law is the form which free men give to justice.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Of course, conservatives always claim to be against judicial activism.

Judges should always behave judicially by adjudicating, never politically by legislating. I leave policy to policymakers. They're preeminent, but they're not omnipotent. In other words, lawmakers decide if laws pass, but judges decide if laws pass muster.

You will read in the newspaper more often about federal courts, but the law that affects people, the trials that affect human beings are by and large in the state courts.

Just because there are people who violate rules, behave illegally and so on, it does not mean that everybody is like that. On the contrary, if you watch certain judges, you observe that they honestly try to implement what they believe the Constitution says and just put it into effect.

Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.

Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.