The outcome of the struggle for control of the courts will determine the future of the rule of law and hence the prospects for the survival of traditional American culture. Behavior and language are now routine that not long ago would have met not only with social disapproval but also with legal sanctions. No doubt public attitudes were changing in any event, but they could not have moved so far and so fast if the courts had not weakened moral curbs and made legal restraint impossible. In destroying those barriers, … the Court has also fostered the immoral attitude that the individual will must be completely emancipated, no matter what the cost. Judicial activism … properly refers to the practice of some judges of enunciating principles and reaching conclusions that cannot plausibly be derived from the Constitution they purport to be interpreting. Activism consists in the assumption by the judiciary of powers not entrusted to it by the document which alone justifies its authority. The results are twofold: the erosion of democracy and the movement of the culture in a left-liberal direction. American law concerning freedom of speech … has been deformed by the almost irrebuttable presumption of unswerving rationality and freedom of individual choice embodied in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s foolish and dangerous metaphor of the marketplace of ideas. There will … always be a gaggle of professors eager to testify that the most blatant pornography is actually a profound parable about the horrors of capitalism or the oppressiveness
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 Number 9, on page 4
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