century, the flexing was not to protect people's rights, but to protect business and the public purse from redistributive social welfare legislation designed to assist those who needed assistance. Like their British colleagues, American judges tended to wrap their mandate protectively around the status quo, becoming activist only to keep government from encroaching on the traditions and rights of vested interests. As a result, until the mid-fifties, neither segregation, McCarthyism, nor the internment of Japanese American received judicial rebuke; the same could not be said, however, for women's advancement, minimum wage laws, or many of the measures introduced to confront the economic nightmare that was the Depression. Activism, today a verbal missile routinely deployed against a judiciary with an expansive view of rights, was once the proud hallmark of a judiciary determined to restrict them. Hence, the futility of labels. But more of that later. The democratic era that started with the American constitution witnessed a relationship between the judiciary and the Bill of Rights that cannot be described as being anything closer than polite until half-way through this century. But with the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education banning segregation in American schools, the relationship turned intense. Shaken by the unimaginably devastating consequences of intolerance in World War II, and shamed by the indifference that permitted the Holocaust's horrifying tenure, the Western world revisited the role of rights, and uttered the international mea culpa found in the Universal Declaration of Human of Rights. The domestic response in