Judicial Activism and its correlative or antonym, Judicial Self-Restraint, entered into scientific-legal parlance in the late 1950s as a by-product of the larger, public political debate in the United States over the proper role of the US Supreme Court in exercising judicial review of constitutionality: whether the Court's judges should restrict themselves, in classical, analytical jurisprudential terms, to deliberately abstract, un-factoriented, grammatical or logical interpretation; or whether, instead, they might opt for a more flexible, historically developmental approach based on identifying claimed rules and precedents in the space-time context in which they had first emerged and then assessing their relevance and capability of creative adaptation to contemporary societal conditions and expectations. The US debate was picked up very early by the judges of the new Constitutional Court [Bundesverfassungsgericht] established under the West German constitution of 1949 with its own obvious intellectual-legal debts to US experience. From the West German judges it entered into general Continental European Civil Law thinking. It was inevitable that it would pass on to the International Court of Justice.