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: The Buck Stops Here

Why Justice Breyer Contradicts Himself

By Stuart Buck, Esq.

Justice Breyer has been a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=508682"known for arguing/a that the US Supreme Court should feel free to take foreign law into account when construing the US Constitution. br /br /But the Supreme Court's 2002 voucher case is a good example of implicit self-contradiction. In that case -- which held that Cleveland's voucher program did not violate the Establishment Clause -- Justice Breyer a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-1751.ZD2.html"dissented/a on the theory that vouchers lead to political strife. But Justice Breyer completely ignored the experience of Belgium: as I point out below, Belgium settled on school vouchers some fifty years ago iprecisely as a way to avoid strife/i.br /br /Here's Justice Breyer writing in the iZelman/i case: blockquoteI write separately, however, to emphasize the risk that publicly financed voucher programs pose in terms of religiously based social conflict...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on December 18, 2008 (boomark / email).