judge-made
Adjective
Meaning
judge-made (not comparable)
(sometimes derogatory) Created by judges or judicial decision; used especially of law applied or established by the judicial interpretation of statutes so as to extend or restrict their scope, as to meet new cases, to provide new or better remedies, etc.
Synonyms
Examples
Our constitution, in short, is a judge-made constitution, and it bears on its face all the features, good and bad, of judge-made law.
The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution.
I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
Even in civil law systems that do not admit judge-made law, it is not always clear when the function of interpretation of the criminal law ends and judicial lawmaking begins.
Bentham disagreed with Blackstone's defence of judge-made law, his defence of legal fictions, his theological formulation of the doctrine of mixed government, his appeal to a social contract and his use of the vocabulary of natural law.
Even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it is relatively uncontroversial for American state courts to rely on English decisions for matters of pure common (i.e. judge-made) law.