Supreme Court Press

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IT is no secret that the current Supreme Court is an activist one in striking down congressional legislation — just look at the prominent cases from the court’s just-completed term, most notably Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which a 5-4 majority of the court’s more conservative justices struck down key provisions of Congress’s bipartisan campaign finance laws.

But “activism” can be measured in ways other than striking down legislation. Indeed, this term’s leading cases highlight another type of Supreme Court activism that hasn’t received much attention: vigorously policing and overturning district court judges who ordinarily would have much more leeway — particularly when those judges had used that leeway in a liberal direction.

District courts are the front-line federal courts. Their judges hear evidence, manage trials, make factual findings, provide appropriate remedies and interpret and apply the law. In their interpretation of legal questions, district court judgments are always open to review on appeal. But in the judges’ other roles they usually have wide discretion, both because they have on-the-ground knowledge of a case and because our judicial system would be overloaded if appellate courts routinely second-guessed trial-court judgments.

Yet with little public attention, the Supreme Court, led by the more conservative justices, has been intervening in these district court roles. In January, for example, the court took the unusual step of granting an emergency stay to stop a district court in California from televising a civil trial over the constitutionality of that state’s Proposition 8, which prohibits same-sex marriage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/opinion/06gewirtz.html?th&emc=th