There is a bizarre idea in leftist circles that U.S. judges should apply the standards of “International Law.” To U.S. cases. From Jonathan Adler via Instapundit:
For example, Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School, mentioned as a possible Kerry Supreme Court nominee, has supported the idea that U.S. courts should expansively apply international legal precedents without the authorization of the president and Congress.
There is one simple reason why this is contrary to everything America stands for. American political theory rest on the idea that all just law arises from the formally expressed will of the people. If at some stage of its development, the people did not vote on a law, the law has no validity. Even the Constitution itself was originally voted on and by design we can vote to amend it as we wish. How, then, can a U.S. judge legitimately use a foreign concept for which the American voters have never cast ballots? By what legal theory are free people bound by the decisions of others in which they have no say? Arguing that judges can impose foreign standards against the will of America voters simply tosses overboard the founding justification for American justice that people should only be governed by law to which they consent.
Sadly, this is just another symptom of the American Left’s progressive (pun intended) abandonment of the American concept of governance in favor of the more authoritarian European model. Incapable of conceiving of their own capacity for error and utterly convinced of their own moral rectitude, they have no intellectual or moral issues with using any means necessary to impose their will upon their fellow citizens. They decide what they want and then manufacture a means of getting it. Invoking some vague “international standard” lets them find the legal justification they want in the entrails of whatever monster of foreign law they want to slit open on that particular day. It’s not “international law” they wish to adopt but rather the sole authority to choose to decided what “international law” means on any particular day or in any particular circumstance.
The American Left is on a long, dark road.
