Representative Government Is At Peril At The Hands Of the Courts!

In the light of what I called the overreaching of the judiciary on purely executive terrain as the implementation of the Development Acceleration Program of the incumbent administration (DAP an economic/policy issue and not a judicial issue), I would like to share the summary of Coercing Virtue by Robert H. Bork printed on the dust jacket of the book itself:

“While the actions of legislatures in America and other democracies are closely watched and hotly debated, the power of judges is largely unchecked and unexamined. For two centuries, judges have steadily expanded their authority, reaching far beyond their traditional responsibilities. Judicial activism now threatens to undermine the power of representative government by usurping policymaking powers that are properly reserved to the people and their elected representatives.

In Coercing Virtue, former U.S. solicitor general and bestselling author Robert H. Bork examines the usurpation of representative government by judicial activism in the United States, Canada, Israel, and through new institutions of international law such as the International Criminal Court.

Bork’s landmark work examines the history of judicial review, from its beginning as a tool to protect essential freedoms to its current role as a device used by judges to constrain the fundamental freedoms that constitutional governments were designed to protect. In the United States, the fundamental question for practitioners of the law has become not what the Constitution means – as defined by its text, history, and structure – but rather what judges will say about it.

Coercing Virtue follows the constitutional adventures of the United States Supreme Court and the rise of judicial activism in other Western nations and in international courts and forums.

Bork discusses the relation between judicial activism and steady erosion of the ideals of democracy and the rule of law. This erosion is slow but it has the capacity to unilaterally alter our form of government without public consent.

Bork places the history and practice of judicial activism in the context of the broader culture war in America and other western nations, revealing the uniquely powerful role of courts in this international intellectual conflict. Bork warns that if we do not understand the worldwide corruption of the judicial function, we cannot comprehend the scope of the political revolution that is overtaking the West.

Coercing Virtue shows how numerous aspects of the activists’ program- hostility to religion, destruction of sexual standards, endorsement of racial and sexual standards, endorsement of racial and sexual preferences in employment and university admissions, and invention of a constitutional right to abortion, to name only a few – have spread across national boundaries. Bork calls on citizens in all Western-style democracies to sit up and take notice of what is happening in their courts before it is too late.”