Bench Memos

Re: Today’s Fun

Ramesh asks, didn’t E.J. Dionne (on whom I commented here) “have a point about the Voting Rights Act? (‘Is it not a form of legislating from the bench for the court and not Congress to decide whether a law is outdated?’)”

My answer: yes.  “Outdated,” so far as I know, is not a category of constitutional analysis.  (That is not, perhaps, the last word about the case in question, but it is not nothing.)  So I will say to E.J. Dionne, let us by all means have a real debate about judicial activism, which is not exclusively the practice of the left.  But let us not begin by forbidding one side in the debate to complain about the other side’s proclivities to it!

Matthew J. Franck is retired from Princeton University, where he was a lecturer in Politics and associate director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He is also a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, a contributing editor of Public Discourse, and professor emeritus of political science at Radford University.
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