This essay examines the intellectual history of the idea of judicial restraint, starting with the early debates among the US Constitution’s founding generation. In the late nineteenth century, law professor James Bradley Thayer championed the concept and passed it on to his students and others, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter, who modified and applied it based on the jurisprudential preoccupations of a different era. In a masterful account, Brad Snyder examines Justice Frankfurter’s attempt to put the idea into practice. Although Frankfurter arguably made a mess of it, he passed the idea of judicial restraint on to Alexander Bickel and others. Today it remains a topic of much academic debate, while Supreme Court Justices occasionally give the idea lip service when it advances outcomes they desire.

I propose that the intellectual history of judicial restraint reflects the all-too-human inability to refrain from exercising power. The founders, focused on the need to mitigate the flaws of human nature in designing the executive and legislative branches, failed to sufficiently foresee how the same flaws would affect members of the judiciary. The failed idea of judicial restraint stands as the legacy of the founders’ mistake.

本文从美国宪法创始一代之间的早期辩论开始，探讨了司法克制理念的思想史。十九世纪末，法学教授詹姆斯·布拉德利·塞耶 (James Bradley Thayer) 倡导了这一概念，并将其传授给他的学生和其他人，包括小奥利弗·温德尔·霍姆斯 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)、勒尼德·汉德 (Learned Hand)、路易斯·布兰代斯 (Louis Brandeis) 和菲利克斯·法兰克福特 (Felix Frankter)，他们根据法理学对这一概念进行了修改和应用。不同时代的关注点。布拉德·斯奈德在精彩的叙述中审视了法兰克福法官将这一想法付诸实践的尝试。尽管法兰克福可以说把事情搞砸了，但他将司法限制的想法传递给了亚历山大·比克尔和其他人。如今，它仍然是学术界争论最多的话题，而最高法院法官偶尔会在这个想法提出他们想要的结果时口头上说说。

我认为，司法克制的思想史反映了人类无法克制权力的行使。创始人在设计行政和立法部门时专注于减轻人性缺陷，未能充分预见到同样的缺陷将如何影响司法部门的成员。司法克制的失败理念是创始人错误的遗产。