Legal News

The Supreme Court Loses Global Influence ? A Good or Bad Thing?

By Ashby Jones

By now, many of you have read Adam Liptak’s piece in today’s NYT — his latest in his “American Exceptionalism” series, on the diminishing influence of the U.S. Supreme Court around the world. The main thesis: Due to several factors — among them our own Court’s general unwillingness to consider foreign rulings, the maturation of other constitutional democracies, and the Court’s tilt to the right –:

American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.

To some quoted in Liptak’s article, this is a bad thing. “One of our great exports used to be constitutional law,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had.”

The Blawgosphere has been all over the story today; but for our money, one need look no further than to the Balkinization blog for two provocative takes. Michael Stokes Paulson writes:

I am relieved, heartened, even delighted that U.S. Supreme Court decisions less often are being cited, adopted, borrowed, or stolen by the courts of foreign nations! Since so much of what passes for “constitutional interpretation” by the U.S. Supreme Court is simply ad hoc judicial policymaking with (at best) tenuous connection to our America constitutional text

Earlier, also on Balkinization, Sandy Levinson offered up this:

“American exceptionalism” has really become synonymous with boorish provincialism, which not only leads to increasing hostility to the US around the world, but, even more to the point, leaves us mired in smug satisfaction, especially on “Constitution Day,” that we really have a Constitution we ought to mindlessly venerate instead of one that we might actually analyze and even make better than it is now.

LBers, any takes on the takes?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 18, 2008 (boomark / email).