Below are quotes, via TownHall.com’s C-Log,
from responses of John G. Roberts, the likely Bush nominee to the
Supreme Court vacancy left by the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor, to past
questions from Sen. Chuck Schumer. Amazingly, these will be
characterized as extreme in the coming days:

My
own judicial philosophy begins with an appreciation of the limited role
of a judge in our system of divided powers. Judges are not to legislate
and are not to execute the laws. . . . My judicial philosophy
accordingly insists upon some rigor in ensuring that judges properly
confine themselves to the adjudication of the case before them, and
seek neither to legislate broadly not to administer the law generally
in deciding that case.



Deciding
the case . . . . requires an essential humility grounded in the
properly limited role of an undemocratic judiciary in a democratic
republic, a humility reflected in doctrines of deference to legislative
policy judgments and embodied in the often misunderstood term ?judicial
restraint.? That restraint does not mean that judges should not act
against the popular will. . . .[T]he framers expected them to be
discerning the law, not shaping policy. That means the judges should
not look to their own personal views or preferences in deciding the
cases before them. Their commission is no license to impose those
preferences from the bench.

This is how he defined judicial activism:

…a judge who has transgressed the limited role assigned to the
judicial branch under the Constitution, and has either undertaken to
exercise the legislative function by imposing his own personal policy
preferences under the guise of legal interpretation, or has arrogated
to himself the executive function by imposing his policy views on how
the law should be administered.