President George Bush might be telling the United States that new Supreme Court Justice David Souter is not an activist judge, but an NIU political scientist doesn’t agree.

Lettie Wenner, political science department chair, thinks Justice Souter is more political than ideological.

“He certainly was picked for what President Bush and John Sununu perceived to be his attitudes on certain ‘litmus’ test issues,” Wenner said.

Activism is not just a liberal or conservative judicial philosophy, she said. Instead, judges get labeled as activists when people oppose the decisions they make, she said.

For example, if Souter voted to make abortion illegal, that would be considered “activism relative to Congress, and much of the American public,” she said.

However, if Souter voted to uphold the Roe vs. Wade decision making abortion legal, the executive branch who wants the decision overturned would call him an activist.

Wenner said Souter has made careful remarks about abortion, civil rights, affirmative action and the death penalty, but they did not show a strict and uncompromising ideological bias.

Wenner believes that activism for conservatives means a judge who legislates from the bench and rewrites laws for political reasons.

Activism for liberals means judges who advocate judicial restraint and claim to interpret the original intent of the constitution while really advancing another political agenda, she said.