Keele Research Repository

The aim of this thesis is to formulate a concept of judicial activism which may be used in the analysis of United States Supreme Court decisions.
Because the methodology employed here departs radically from the behaviouralist approach which has dominated judicial research for the past twenty years, Chapter One offers a critique of judicial behaviour­alism. The critique seeks to demonstrate that not only are the behaviouralists wrong in their assumption that Supreme Court Justices are motivated solely by political policy predilection, but that their means of ''proving" that assumption - unidimensional scalogram analysis - is circular.
Chapter Two outlines the methodology employed here, which is based on two major assumptions. Firstly, that Supreme Court Justices are motivated by a variety of factors, one of which may be their consciousness of their somewhat anomalous role in a democracy. Secondly, that this consciousness or lack of it, will be revealed by close, critical analysis of their judicial opinions. Far from acc­epting the behaviouralist view that opinions are mere camouflage and that only the bare votes of the Justices are reliable evidence, it is held here that opinions are the most fecund source of information about judicial decisions.
Chapter Three and Four contain the analyses of the opinions of Justices George Sutherland and William 0. Douglas, respectively.
These Justices were chosen because both are considered to be extreme activists and yet their political views and the subject of the legis­lation with which they were concerned were completely different. The analyses reveal that both men possessed a coherent judicial philosophy which may be labelled activist.
Chapter Five compares these two philosophies and finds that they were very similar. Because of the major differences between the two Justices