JUSTICE TAKES A HOLIDAY
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James Joyner | Friday, July 18, 2003 |
Is the amusing title of Terry Eastland’s piece noting that five of the nine Justices of the US Supreme Court have taken off for Europe since the end of the session. Echoing comments I made earlier, he thinks they’d be better off hanging around the American heartland and getting in touch with reality:
Under our Constitution, the Supreme Court has the authority to determine whether legislative acts are constitutional. But such determinations require the court to figure out what a document framed and ratified by Americans means. It is odd to think that the interpretative task could include borrowing from the judgments of other courts to discern constitutional meaning. Moreover, it is “this constitution” that Article VI says “all judicial officers are “bound by oath or affirmation” to support.In his dissent in Lawrence, Justice Antonin Scalia made the obvious point that “constitutional entitlements do not spring into existence, as the court seems to believe, because foreign nations decriminalized [homosexual] conduct.” The court’s discussion of “foreign views,” he added, is “meaningless” yet “dangerous” dicta.
Why “dangerous”? No doubt because Justice Scalia knows that no fewer than six justices–Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter and John Paul Stevens being the other five–are drawn to “foreign views” and someday could form a majority constitionalizing some foreign view or other. In which case the justices in that majority would have violated their oath.
While I find the European values argument rather specicious, the general point of the piece is worth considering.
(Hat tip: Howard Bashman)
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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