Weapon of war

IN A NEW BOOK, FORMER SOLICITOR GENERAL AND federal judge Robert Bork shows how judges have expanded their power at the expense of legislatures, not just in America but around the world.

Judge Bork, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, has warned against allowing judges to make law in his best-selling books, The Tempting of America and Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Now, in Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges, he chronicles the rise of judicial activism in America and marks its spread to the courts of other countries and new global institutions such as the International Criminal Court.

While commentators have examined individual examples of judicial activism, Judge Bork places this dangerous trend "in the context of the broader culture war in America and other Western countries." He shows how the liberal side in that war has achieved its agenda through court decisions when it could not do so in the political process.