Dominic Raab Quotes

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

In the last four years the sound rule of giving statutes the benefit of all reasonable doubt has been cast aside. The Court has been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body…. Judges who will bring to the Courts a present-day sense of the Constitution - Judges who will retain in the Courts the judicial functions of a court, and reject the legislative powers which the courts have today assumed.

The fact that the judiciary makes foolish rulings doesn’t mean the government should intervene.

The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

If judicial review means anything, it is that judicial restraint does not allow everything.

Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.

In my judgment the people of no nation can lose their liberty so long as a Bill of Rights like ours survives and its basic purposes are conscientiously interpreted, enforced and respected so as to afford continuous protection against old, as well as new, devices and practices which might thwart those purposes. I fear to see the consequences of the Court's practice of substituting its own concepts of decency and fundamental justice for the language of the Bill of Rights as its point of departure in interpreting and enforcing that Bill of Rights.

This Court seems incapable of admitting that some matters - any matters - are none of its business.

A strict constructionist is a judge who favors criminal prosecutors over criminal defendants and civil rights defendants over civil rights plaintiffs.

The Supreme Court only hears the cases that it wants to hear.

Formalist judges needlessly complexity the law in part to avoid the struggle to understand the complex real-world environment that generates much of the business of the modern court.

The perception of the Supreme Court as a political court in most constitutional cases and many nonconstitutional ones derives from the fact that the justices form confident views without any empirical basis for them.

If judges were just secret legislators, declaring not what the law is but what they would like it to be, the very idea of a government by the people and for the people would be at risk. And those who came to court would live in fear, never sure exactly what governs them except the judge’s will. As Alexander Hamilton explained, "liberty can have nothing to fear from” judges who apply the law, but liberty "ha[s] every thing to fear" if judges try to legislate too.

A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge... stretching for results he prefers rather than those the law demands.

You just never know what the Supreme Court is going to do.

As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment and not will. Judicial activism is best understood as substituting judicial opinion for the command of law. The law is not an infinitely malleable tool.

The Supreme Court overrules, distinguishes, and upholds prior precedents. Sometimes it ignores them. But it does not - cannot - 'defy' them.

It is not the responsibility of the judiciary to amend poor legislative drafting, even if judges would personally prefer a different outcome than what is required by a statute's text.

I am angry - mad - at the Chief Justice, John Roberts.

Contrary to the myth that the U.K. respects decisions of the Strasbourg court but many other adherent states do not, the convention and Strasbourg court judgements have proved a highly effective tool in protecting and developing human rights in countries with no tradition of the rule of law.

It was in that uncertain world that the European Convention on Human Rights was shaped. Written by Conservatives, it set out the principles which should lie behind a modern democratic state, where human rights were respected.

If we were to allow the Chris Grayling and his cronies to tear up the Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights from which it is derived, we would set back the cause of victims' rights by decades.

As a general rule, I do not think judges should consider current societal preferences when ruling on constitutional challenges.

My Democratic colleagues, many of whom hold law degrees, should know better than to intentionally oversimplify court rulings to mislead the public and score political points.

In the past there has been debate as to whether or not traditional rights such as that to trial by jury might be protected or if a Bill of Rights should extend into areas of social and economic policy.