The fools drape our Constitution in foreign cloth
Foreign Law and the U.S. Constitution
Kenneth Anderson, Policy Review
The more the Court feels free to trample states' rights, the more cavalier they seem to be getting about using odd, cheaply made, imitation foreign spectacles for reading the most important words ever smithed by this nation's founding fathers.
I'm just about ready to accept any judicial appointment that Bush gets the chance to make. I'm hoping he gets more than two. I'm more than happy to live with decisions that I find disagreeable as long as the Court stops looking outside the confines of original intent for guidance.
If Bush's nominees adhere to this one self-constraint alone, it will ensure that the court will cease its willy-nilly predisposition to just make things - LAWS - up according to how the wind blows in France.
Kenneth Anderson, Policy Review
"The Roper doctrine is thus the more startling because it is not principally about drawing foreign or international law as such into U.S. constitutional adjudication. It is not even about law as law. Instead, it is about drawing from such legal materials evidence as to foreign or international public opinion — more precisely, evidence about elite opinion in other parts of the world, especially Western European elites whose views are more than likely to coincide with the Roper majority’s own. Roper gathers up this body of foreign elite opinion, acknowledges it as opinion about values (rather than law as such), and blesses it as a source of decision-making by the Court. It is not (yet) binding precedent, to be sure, because it is not law as such, but it is not irrelevant either; nothing that a court need follow, because it is not law as such, but something a court, on no determinate basis, may choose to take into account. As Justice Scalia observes in dissent, the heart of the Roper doctrine is that 'though the views of our own citizens are essentially irrelevant to the Court’s decision today, the views of other countries and the so-called international community take center stage.'"
The more the Court feels free to trample states' rights, the more cavalier they seem to be getting about using odd, cheaply made, imitation foreign spectacles for reading the most important words ever smithed by this nation's founding fathers.
I'm just about ready to accept any judicial appointment that Bush gets the chance to make. I'm hoping he gets more than two. I'm more than happy to live with decisions that I find disagreeable as long as the Court stops looking outside the confines of original intent for guidance.
If Bush's nominees adhere to this one self-constraint alone, it will ensure that the court will cease its willy-nilly predisposition to just make things - LAWS - up according to how the wind blows in France.
