Judicial Regraint Approach

Although the creation of judicial review was a significant victory for the Supreme Court, it is also much more complicated than what meets the eye. Judicial review can also be more accurately described as “constitutional review” due to the controversial methods that judicial reviews is carried out (“Judicial Review | Law”) . Such views included what is referred to as “judicial restraint approach” and “activist approach.” In judicial restraint approach, judges are believed to be able to decide cases only on the basis of the language of the laws and the Constitution. However, when looking at the activist approach, judges are able to recognize the principles of the laws or the Constitution and use them in response to circumstances of moral or …show more content…
Paul Railroad Co. v. Minnesota where substantive due process was also used for the first time. Although the U.S. government and court system was criticized during the early 1900s during the Populists and Progressive movements, judicial review still remained a strong source of power in the Judicial branch as seen by the Supreme Court striking down a federal income tax in Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan & Trust Co., limiting the power of the Sherman Antitrust Act in United States v. E. C. Knight Co., and by keeping states from regulating their own working hours in Lochner v. New York. Nevertheless, the criticism towards judicial review continued and the uses of substantive due process, requiring legislations to be fair and reasonable, brought about charges of “judicial activism” and accusations of the Supreme Court acting too much like a legislative body than a judicial body. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. played a large role in advocating for these charges in Lochner v. New York, but ultimately did not succeed due to judicial review playing an even larger part in the economic regulations of the 1930s. In fact, judicial review was put into practice a total of eight times in President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program. However, in the late 1930s, the Supreme Court began to divert away from the principles of substantive due process and no longer thought of the Constitution as hurting social and economic legislation through the upholding of the Wagner Act which allowed industrial workers to have the ability to bargain collectively and unionize freely (“Judicial Review”). Therefore, the time period from 1865 to 1937 showed the significance of the relationship between the government and the economy, though it did place more restrictions on governmental powers (Wilson