[Kennedy's] successor will almost surely push the court even further to the right, and with 70-year-old Clarence Thomas as the oldest remaining conservative judge, the change could be generational.

Yet for all the anger at courts we will see from liberals in the coming years, a generation of conservative judicial opinions will strike many conservatives as a just comeuppance. During a period of liberal judicial ascendance — stretching roughly from the late 1930s to the early 1970s — courts weakened property rights, strengthened civil rights and voting rights, invented new rights for criminal defendants, protected pornographers and radicals, and created rights to abortion and contraception.

Conservatives during those years cried foul against “judicial activism,” which, they said, violated democratic principles. Liberals have begun to make the same argument since the advent of the conservative ascendancy over the past few decades. Conservatives and liberals might disagree about the outcomes of specific cases but they seem to agree that a society in which the most contentious social issues are determined by the views of unelected judges is not a healthy one.

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