Judicial activism can have both positive and negative impacts on American society either as a whole or as individuals depending on which side of the particular subject that is taken or the interpretation of it. As judicial analyst and former Judge Andrew Napolitano once said, “There is no such thing as an activist judge. An activist judge is one whose ruling you disagree with. And if you agree with what the judge has done, you call them heroic and honest” (Wojdacz, 2009). Usually a judge is called an activist when they make a ruling that is based on their interpretations of the Constitution or laws. After all, the job of the Supreme Court is to interpret the law where it is unclear or in question and when laws or rulings of lower courts are challenged, it is the Supreme Court justices that must examine the law and determine if the intention of the law has …show more content…
Ferguson, Row v. Wade, Bush v. Gore, Obergefell v. Hodges, and most recently, The Affordable Care Act. More specifically, in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), the Supreme Court of Louisiana in a (7-1) decision, upheld a previous ruling by the State of Louisiana that claimed that the state was not in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the new Fourteenth Amendment. The justices of the Supreme Court of Louisiana used a form of judicial activism by interpreting the new Fourteenth Amendment to fit their racist agenda which denied fair and impartial justice to Homer Plessy and allowed for legalized segregation which lasted until 1954. The decision was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483, on May 17, 1954, as the “Warren Court” ruled in a unanimous (9–0) decision which handed down that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” In addition, this decision officially asserted that racial segregation was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States