Abstract:
A relatively small body of scholarship which has attempted to define and measure
judicial activism has largely focused on the application of legal principles about the
traditional role of the judiciary. Judges are considered ‘activist’ where these traditional
concepts are distorted in some way. Some scholars have attempted to define a finite number
of contexts in which judges’ actions will constitute ‘activism’, whereas others have attempted
to create broad principles which may be applied to any context. Disagreement has focused on
whether jurisdictional relativism should be imported into the measurement system to
accommodate discrepancies in legal principles – such as adherence to concepts like
parliamentary sovereignty - or whether the principles should broad enough to apply to all
jurisdictions. Another catagory of debate concerns whether the term should be a pejorative
one, implying judicial abuse of power; or merely a description of actions that diverge from
the judiciary’s normal area of jurisdiction. However, one constant feature which has tended
to unite all scholars has been a reliance on traditional principles of power distribution, as the
basis for the definition.
