Editor:
In his Oct. 29 column (“Take time to cast informed vote”) Will Wood states that “the biggest example of ‘judicial activism’ we have ever witnessed was the recent decision by the current, conservative-dominated Supreme Court to take away a right from Americans.” He is presumably referring to the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. I would argue that the biggest example of judicial activism we have ever witnessed is, in fact, the Roe v. Wade decision itself.
In this 1973 decision, the Supreme Court overrode the democratic prerogative of state legislatures, our laboratories of democracy, to legislate on this issue. The court invented a right to privacy from whole cloth that was not in the Constitution. It made abortion a federal right for all Americans; people in states who disagreed (the majority at the time) be damned. Even the iconic liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg disagreed with the merits of this ruling and how it was decided.
To many Americans, the Dobbs decision righted a terribly wrongheaded ruling. The Supreme Court is not infallible, witness Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott v. Standford. The stare decisis principle is not absolute.
If Roe was not the ultimate example of judicial activism, I don’t know what is. Just because you — or even a majority of Americans — disagree with a ruling does not render it judicial activism.
Barry Llewellyn
Wyomissing
Source: Berkshire mont