Ginsburg and Foreign Law

Timothy Birdnow

Justice Ginsberg wants to scrap the U.S. Constitution and substitute foreign law.
http://netrightdaily.com/2012/02/justice-ginsburg-substitutes-constitution-for-foreign-buffet/

Madam Ginsburg stated:

“I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012"

and she suggests she would be more interested in South Africa's constitution than ours.

While she cannot actually scrap the Constitution, she can borrow from foreign law to make her decisions rather than looking to American jurisprudence.

And that she has done: in 2003 she based her decision in Gruner v. Bollinger et al on an international treaty on race rather than U.S. legal precedent. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=000&invol=02-241 for example.

The thing about using foreign law is, which foreign law are you going to choose. If foreign law can be used to justify a decision than another foreign law could be used to justify it's opposite. If, say, a discrimination case came before the court in which a woman bus driver was not promoted because of her sex, should case law from Denmark be employed to find in favor of the plaintiff, or should Saudi law be used to decide the woman should not be driving in the first place? Based on foreign law one can justify anything up to and including female circumcision and slavery. It becomes a matter of pure personal opinion; which laws are more pleasing to your personal desires. Law loses all meaning when it becomes too broad-based, and then becomes an act of judicial tyranny dressed in legalese. American law must apply to American cases, or there is no law at all.

Ginsburg is proof that we need term limits on sitting judges.