Of course they don't put it that way. We get the point anyhow. The justices are cutting the voters, and their elected representatives, a little slack, following the lead of the Founding Fathers, who thought they were setting up three separate, equal and coordinate branches of government.

The Wall Street Journal credits Chief Justice John Roberts during the court's late term with loosening the saddle on the court's high horse, persuading just enough colleagues that this question or that one "didn't (in the Journals' words) belong before a judge at all."

A pre-eminent instance of such forbearance is last week's school assignment decision. Fifty-three years after Brown v. Board of Education broke up officially prescribed school segregation, the court can't free itself entirely from the notion it has to break up purely coincidental segregation.

In the '70s the high court commanded forced busing for racial balance. Their imperial highnesses hadn't considered that students with a way out of such a mess would take it. Private schools, the suburbs, home schooling -- white students headed for the door, toward the better schooling they were sure they would find in schools not run by the courts. School segregation today is more widespread than before Brown. Yet judges keep trying.

Judicial restraint is the name of the doctrine that says they shouldn't keep trying -- that they should avoid undertaking more than they are called on to do as members of a government widely believed to function by checks and balances, and a sense of restraint.

Restraint isn't, to say the least, a very 21st century notion -- have you taken in YouTube lately? Nor does it go down well with unelected, semi-immunized officials like judges: such judges as can't get over believing they know better than the rest of us put together.

Which they don't. How educational, how just plain nice, to see them get taken down a peg -- by their own kind.