judicial restraint

judicial restraint, a procedural or substantive approach to the exercise of judicial review. As a procedural doctrine, the principle of restraint urges judges to refrain from deciding legal issues, and especially constitutional ones, unless the decision is necessary to the resolution of a concrete dispute between adverse parties. As a substantive one, it urges judges considering constitutional questions to grant substantial deference to the views of the elected branches and invalidate their actions only when constitutional limits have clearly been violated. Compare judicial activism.

In U.S. federal courts, several doctrines operate to promote procedural restraint. The requirement of standing, drawn from the federal court jurisdiction outlined in Article III of the Constitution, restricts access to court to those who can demonstrate a concrete injury, caused by the defendant, and redressable by a judicial decision. Federal courts will not hear suits pursuing generalized grievances or seeking abstract legal guidance, and this aspect of restraint is linked to the view of courts as institutions designed to resolve disputes rather than to promulgate legal norms. (By contrast, in some other countries [e.g., Germany] and some American states, courts regularly decide legal issues in the absence of adversary proceedings.) Similarly, the doctrine of ripeness prevents plaintiffs from seeking judicial relief while a threatened harm is merely conjectural, and the doctrine of mootness prevents judges from deciding cases after a dispute has concluded and legal resolution will have no practical effect.

Even if cases may properly be heard in federal court in the United States, judicial restraint offers limiting procedural devices. The canon of constitutional avoidance directs courts to decide constitutional questions only as a last resort. Thus, if a case may be decided on multiple grounds, judges should prefer one that allows them to avoid a constitutional issue. The canon of constitutional doubt advises courts to construe statutes so as to avoid constitutional questions. If two readings of a statute are possible, and one raises doubt about the statute’s constitutionality, the other should be preferred.

Last, if a constitutional issue must be faced, a restrained judge will presume the constitutionality of government action and strike it down only if the constitutional violation is clear. Restrained judges are also less willing to overturn the precedents of prior judicial decisions.

Judicial restraint counsels judges to be cautious in enforcing their views of the meaning of the Constitution. It does not tell them how to arrive at those views, and it thus has no necessary connection to any particular method of constitutional interpretation. Arguments that a particular method of interpretation produces greater restraint are usually actually arguments that the method produces greater constraint on judges, leaving them less freedom to decide cases on the basis of their policy preferences.

Judicial restraint has a long history in American legal theory and case law. U.S. Supreme Court decisions as early as Fletcher v. Peck (1810) state that judges should strike down laws only if they “feel a clear and strong conviction” of unconstitutionality. Early scholars also endorsed the idea; one notable example is Harvard law professor James Bradley Thayer (1831–1902), who observed that a legislator might vote against a law because he believed it unconstitutional but nonetheless, if he later became a judge, properly vote to uphold it on the grounds of restraint.

The general effect of judicial restraint is to allow the legislature and executive greater freedom to formulate policy. Its political valence has thus varied depending on the relative positions of the Supreme Court and the elected branches. In the first half of the 20th century, judicial restraint was generally invoked by liberals in the hopes of preventing courts from striking down Progressive and New Deal economic regulation. Supreme Court justices associated with progressive restraint include Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (served 1902–32), Louis Brandeis (1916–39), and Felix Frankfurter (1939–62).

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In the second half of the century, during the tenure of Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953–69), the Supreme Court began taking positions more liberal than the states and the federal government, and restraint became a common conservative political theme. Justices endorsing restraint during this period included John Marshall Harlan (1955–71) and Frankfurter, who continued to endorse the principle even as its politics shifted around him.

As with its political valence, judicial restraint does not have a consistent normative value. In general, restraint is typically considered desirable on the grounds that in a democracy elected officials should play the primary role in making policy. Courts that are insufficiently deferential to elected legislators and executives may usurp that role and unduly constrain democratic self-governance. On the other hand, protection of constitutional rights, particularly those of minorities, demands a certain degree of judicial assertiveness. A restrained court may decline to interfere with serious infringements on such rights, and indeed some of the Supreme Court’s most reviled decisions—including Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the court upheld racial segregation of railroad cars and established the “separate-but-equal” doctrine, and Korematsu v. United States (1944), in which the court upheld race-based discrimination against Japanese Americans during World War II—fit this pattern.