Apple of Doubt

Many conservatives attack the role of the judiciary in the balance of political power. Specifically they condemn a type of judicial review they have termed “judicial activism“. This term and the controversy surrounding it most recently came to the public’s attention when the California supreme court overturned that state’s same-sex marriage ban. This concept is emerging once again surrounding a similar ruling in Iowa. I find the whole concept to be arbitrary and largely baseless. However I think one of the most important points of this debate is layed out rather eloquently by Alexander Hamilton. In the Federalist No. 78 Hamilton addressed the issue of judicial review saying,

But it is not with a view to infractions of the Constitution only, that the independence of the judges may be an essential safeguard against the effects of occasional ill humors in the society. These sometimes extend no farther than to the injury of the private rights of particular classes of citizens, by unjust and partial laws. Here also the firmness of the judicial magistracy is of vast importance in mitigating the severity and confining the operation of such laws. It not only serves to moderate the immediate mischiefs of those which may have been passed, but it operates as a check upon the legislative body in passing them; who, perceiving that obstacles to the success of iniquitous intention are to be expected from the scruples of the courts, are in a manner compelled, by the very motives of the injustice they meditate, to qualify their attempts.