‘America is in danger of becoming something of a legal backwater’

Not my quote but that of Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia. He and other justices of supreme courts around the worlds, or at least the English-speaking world, consider our own Supreme Court less and less relevant to them.

Why?

In two words, “Antonin Scalia.”

Scalia is the intellectual powerhouse of a U.S. Supreme Court that has become more and more disdainful of international law, and other countries top judicial decisions, even as more and more countries have modernized court systems.

And fellow Justice Anthony Kennedy doesn’t like the attitude:

“There’s kind of a know-nothing quality to the debate, it seems to me, of being suspicious of foreign things,” he said in remarks at a judicial conference in July.

Of course, I think that’s Nino’s attitude to anyone why disagrees with him, but that’s another thing.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has a better insight:

“Foreign opinions are not authoritative; they set no binding precedent for the U.S. judge,” she said in a 2006 address to the Constitutional Court of South Africa. “But they can add to the story of knowledge relevant to the solution of trying questions.”

So, it’s not just that Nino is suspicious of foreign things, but that he’s contemptuous of them.