The practice of courts, especially federal courts in the United States, to use legal conflicts to determine social policy. Rather than seeing the judicial process as limited to criminal or civil disputes between individuals, judicial activism sees the courts as applying law (or the constitution) to social issues, such as racial or gender equality, education, prison conditions, and environmental quality. The classic example of judicial activism was the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, in which all public schools in the United States were ordered to integrate black and white students, ending racial segregation.

Since then, U.S. federal courts have used legal issues to legislate policy over voting districts, job safety, prison conditions, and environmental matters. Critics of judicial activism (which is often associated with the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, or "the Warren Court") argue that it exceeds the proper role and authority of the courts and takes power from the legislature. Judicial activism, therefore, raises fundamental questions about the distribution of power among the various branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial) and the roles of each branch of government relative to the others. U.S. Federalism involves a system of checks and balances that cause the different functions of the various branches of government to impinge on each other and, to a certain extent, to overlap each other, which makes it difficult to define exact limits of authority in each branch. Arguments over the extent of the courts' role and authority are consequently highlighted by judicial activism.

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