Judicial philosophy is the fundamental set of ideas and beliefs of a judge or justice, in which shapes his or her rulings of a specific case. As well as, how both judge or justice interpret the law. Judicial scholars interpret judges and justices as being either “activists” or “restraints” based on their judicial philosophy. Judicial activism is the philosophy of judicial decision-making whereby judges allow, mainly their personal views about public policy to guide their decisions. More specifically, according from the book, American Government and Politics Today, written by, Steffen Schmidt, Mack Shelly II, and Barbara Bardes, “The doctrine of judicial activism rests on the conviction that the federal judiciary should …show more content…
Gore (2000), and the persistent uncertainty about the results of the election in Florida is a clear example. Gore petitioned for a recount, thus the local court of Florida, required the city, Palm Beach, to manually recount their ballots since voters in Florida claimed that they had problems with the state’s electronic voting machines. Due to this issue, the ballots were not properly punched, causing a large number discrepancy on who the voters wanted to vote for, and developed a distrust that some of the members of the ballot counting committee were not being honest in the tally of votes. Later, the case was turned over to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Gore was thought to be the clear win in his case that the ballots were to be manually recounted. Unfortunately, the result was in favor of Bush, and claimed that having a recount would violate his Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, stating that the federal government is to respect, maintain and uphold the legal rights of American citizens. Thus, the recount was put to halt, and made Bush immediately as president without knowing the results of the recount. From the news article, “Just How Bad Was Bush v. Gore?”, written by, on, The Atlantic, “…these Justices had said that they believed in the preëminence of states’ rights, in a narrow conception of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and, above all, in judicial restraint. Bush v. Gore violated those principles." The court’s decision was 7-2, having many to believe that the justices came to the decision for their own personal benefit rather than for the law, since Justices were the ultimate decision to who becomes president. Some opinions were that that decision was the most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the one case where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants,