Posted on 03/15/2006 2:17:12 PM PST by Liz
WASHINGTON Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she and former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor have been the targets of death threats from the "irrational fringe" of society, people apparently spurred by Republican criticism of the high court.
Ginsburg revealed in a speech in South Africa last month that she and O'Connor were threatened a year ago by someone who called on the Internet for the immediate "patriotic" killing of the justices.
Security concerns among judges have been growing.
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter joked earlier this year that Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned. Over the past few months O'Connor has complained that criticism, mainly by Republicans, has threatened judicial independence to deal with difficult issues like gay marriage.
Worry is not limited to the Supreme Court. Three quarters of the nation's 2,200 federal judges have asked for government-paid home security systems, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said this week.
Ginsburg said the Web threat was apparently prompted by legislation in Congress, filed by Republicans, that would bar judges from relying on foreign laws or court decisions.
"It is disquieting that they have attracted sizable support. And one not-so-small concern _ they fuel the irrational fringe," she said in a speech posted online by the court earlier this month and first reported Wednesday by LegalTimes.com.
According to Ginsburg, someone in a Web site chat room wrote: "Okay commandoes, here is your first patriotic assignment ... an easy one. Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and O'Connor have publicly stated that they use (foreign) laws and rulings to decide how to rule on American cases. This is a huge threat to our Republic and Constitutional freedom. ... If you are what you say you are, and NOT armchair patriots, then those two justices will not live another week."
Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., a sponsor of one of the congressional proposals, wrote about the legislation on his Web site and in bold letters featured a quote from O'Connor predicting the Supreme Court would probably increasingly rely on foreign courts.
Ginsburg pointed out that the legislation was first proposed in 2004, an election year.
Justices, in some of their most hotly contested rulings, have looked overseas. Last year, for example, justices barred the executions of juvenile killers on a 5-4 vote. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said then that "it is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty."
In an angry dissent to that decision, Justice Antonin Scalia said capital punishment policy should be set by states, not "the subjective views of five members of this court and like-minded foreigners."
Ginsburg said, "Critics in Congress and in the media misperceive how and why U.S. courts refer to foreign and international court decisions." She said those decisions are used for guidance only.
O'Connor said last week during a speech at Georgetown Law School that the justices have received threats. But the Ginsburg remarks at the Constitutional Court of South Africa provide unusual detail.
Ginsburg, who turned 73 Wednesday, told the audience O'Connor "remains alive and well _ as for me, you can judge for yourself."
___
On the Net:
Justice Ginsburg speech:
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/publicinfo/speeches/sp_02-07b-06.html
Stay safe...resign today.
Sounds like Ginsberg is a victim.
Yup...she's a lib.
Sounds good to me.
Sniffle....she's a victim....sob.
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She probably dreamed up the whole thing.....while sleeping...on the bench.
Mm. Rough job. Better quit.
If she couldn't handle being a SCJ should would resign. If she thinks she has it bad, she should run for President.
Not that she's capable of recogizing cause and effect, of course.
It comes with the job, I'm sure President Bush receives more threats than any other political figure but you don't hear him whining. The courts deserve the criticism they get and in more principled times their lives would indeed be in danger if only from the threat of imprisonment.
Ole Ruthie is telling the truth here though.
She's brain dead. Disconnect the feeding tube.
Wait a minute. The left has loudly been proclaiming their "Patriotism" to all who will listen (and to many of us who would prefer not to). Maybe they are mad at Ruth 'Buzzi' Ginsberg because she has not done enough for their cause?
"Perhaps, just perhaps, they should wonder about this. Americans are normally fairly laid back about most things. I'm sure it couldn't be that people see things as getting dangerously out of sync, a court that for some reason can over rule the executive and legislature. A court that seems to just make up law as it goes along. A court that is oblivious and impervious, or worse, to the effects of its decisions.
None of this would make people start thinking the court is nothing more than a domestic enemy."
Golly, are you stipulating logic and common sense? Surely, you jest.
This harpy is not fit to be on any court. She goes to South Africa to spout her paranoid crap. Let them spend the money to protect her and her love of foreign law. Spit on her and her foreign law.
There must have been a time in this country that the supreme court justices didn't have to worry about these kind of threats in that they didn't render any opinions that remotely deserved that kind of attention.
Sounds like fear born of a guilty conscience to me.
Like hell she did. From the transcript:
http://www.concourt.gov.za/site/ginsberg.html
Another trenchant critic, Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, commented not long ago: “To cite foreign law as authority is to flirt with the discredited . . . idea of a universal natural law; or to suppose fantastically that the world’s judges constitute a single, elite community of wisdom and conscience.” Judge Posner’s view rests, in part, on the concern that U. S. judges do not comprehend the social, historical, political, and institutional background from which foreign opinions emerge. Nor do we even understand the language in which laws and judgments, outside the common law realm, are written.
Judge Posner is right, of course, to this extent: Foreign opinions are not authoritative; they set no binding precedent for the U. S. judge. But they can add to the store of knowledge relevant to the solution of trying questions. Yes, we should approach foreign legal materials with sensitivity to our differences, deficiencies, and imperfect understanding, but imperfection, I believe, should not lead us to abandon the effort to learn what we can from the experience and good thinking foreign sources may convey.
-- snip --
To a large extent, I believe, the critics in Congress and in the media misperceive how and why U. S. courts refer to foreign and international court decisions. We refer to decisions rendered abroad, it bears repetition, not as controlling authorities, but for their indication, in Judge Wald’s words, of “common denominators of basic fairness governing relationships between the governors and the governed.”
-- snip --
The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions, as my quotation from Chief Justice Taney suggested, is in line with the view of the U. S. Constitution as a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification. I am not a partisan of that view. U. S. jurists honor the Framers’ intent “to create a more perfect Union,” I believe, if they read the Constitution as belonging to a global 21st century, not as fixed forever by 18th-century understandings.
-- snip --
Returning to my main theme, I will recount briefly and chronologically the Supreme Court’s most recent decisions involving foreign or international legal sources as an aid to the resolution of constitutional questions. In a headline 2002 decision, Atkins v. Virginia, a six-member majority (all save the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia and Thomas) held unconstitutional the execution of a mentally retarded offender. The Court noted that “within the world community, the imposition of the death penalty for crimes committed by mentally retarded offenders is overwhelmingly disapproved.” (South Africa, of course, figures prominently in the worldwide disapproval, the Constitutional Court having held a decade ago that capital punishment in any case is unconstitutional.)
New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote of the following, 2002–2003, Term: The Court has “displayed a [steadily growing] attentiveness to legal developments in the rest of the world and to the [C]ourt’s role in keeping the United States in step with them.” Among examples from that Term, I would include the Michigan University affirmative action cases decided June 23, 2003. Although the Court splintered, it upheld the Michigan Law School program. In separate opinions, I looked to two United Nations Conventions: the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the United States has ratified; and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which, sadly, the United States has not yet ratified. Both Conventions distinguish between impermissible policies of oppression or exclusion, and permissible policies of inclusion, “temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality.” The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Michigan Law School case, I observed, “accords with the international understanding of the [purpose and propriety] of affirmative action.” (South Africa’s Constitution is clear on that matter; Section 9(2) provides: “To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.”)
A better indicator from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002–2003 Term, because it attracted a majority, is Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court in Lawrence v. Texas, announced June 26, 2003. Overruling a 1986 decision, Lawrence declared unconstitutional a Texas statute prohibiting two adult persons of the same sex from engaging, voluntarily, in intimate sexual conduct. (I think it highly unlikely, however, that we will soon see a U. S. Supreme Court decision resembling the very recent decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in Minister of Home Affairs v. Fourie.) On the question of dynamic versus static, frozen-in-time constitutional interpretation, the Court’s Lawrence v. Texas opinion instructs:
Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.
On respect for “the Opinions of [Human]kind,” the Lawrence Court emphasized: “The right the petitioners seek in this case has been accepted as an integral part of human freedom in many other countries.” In support, the Court cited the leading 1981 European Court of Human Rights decision, Dudgeon v. United Kingdom, and subsequent European Human Rights Court decisions affirming the protected right of homosexual adults to engage in intimate, consensual conduct...
--------------
Ginsburg is so two-faced in this speech that it's hard to adquately put into words her mendacity.
[Over the past few months O'Connor has complained that criticism, mainly by Republicans, has threatened judicial independence to deal with difficult issues like gay marriage.]
I'm assuming she is also deeply concerned about the countless threats of violence against Republicans, especially President Bush, and how this Democratic Party encouraged hatred undermines our political process.
/sarcasm/
In the beginning of the article they actual state that the death threats were "apparently" spurred on by Republicans!!!!! That is truly outrageous.
Anyone who thinks that the killing of individuals changes anything in a Constitutional Republic such as ours, is an ignorant fool, and an enemy of America. In America, one kills bad ideas, not bad people.
Even if true, this is a tasteless JOKE. Do you think Julianne Malveaux, leftist writer, was kidding when she said this?
Does that sound like a joke to you?"The man is on the Court. You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease. Well, that’s how I feel. He is an absolutely reprehensible person."-- USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, November 4, 1994 PBS To the Contrary.
Yes it is. It evidences the fact that she has no business being on the Court.
That is so over the top, so provocative as to, at the very least, warrant some official condemnation in the form of a censure from every branch of government.
Ginsburg? Is she awake today?
Ginsberg is not only a liar, but an ugly liar.
Why doesn't she join her friend O'Connor and leave then?
Everyone in public life gets death threats. The raising of these threats is nothing more than a ploy to silence critics, and I won't be silenced.
When they choose to act like Lords and Ladies over the rest of the population, there are consequences. Is killing a judge an appropriate consequence? Nope. But impeaching said Justices IS.
Follow the Constitution and the problems will go away.
My judge walked up to the guy and took one of the handbills from him to show he wasn't intimidated. It happens to everyone, not just democrats.
Amazing Fact of the Day: In a population of several hundred million, there are bound to be a few crazies, some of whose keepers allow them on the internet.
I hope nobody here at Free Republic would be involved in any such unseemly threats, and I hope the reference to Ann Coulter is a misstatement. Objection to judges' actions or philosophy, but the solution is to appoint better ones, and of course impeachment if there is an impeachable offense.
Even if true, this is a tasteless JOKE. Do you think Julianne Malveaux, leftist writer, was kidding when she said this?
"The man is on the Court. You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease. Well, that’s how I feel. He is an absolutely reprehensible person."
-- USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, November 4, 1994 PBS To the Contrary.
Frankly, I think both comments were meant to be tongue in cheek and that both were out of line.
That's just me.
Stick to the US Constitution. Its in your job description, Ruth.
Such threats are pulled whenever brought to our attention, and those who make a habit of them are evicted.
O'Connor & Ginsberg are bigger threats to the American people than the other way around!
Why are these kind of statements made so often overseas . . . .?
And does she really believe that SCOTUS should consult in legal traditions foreign to Anglo-American jurisprudence?
Someone tell the court that we are a self-governing people. Their job is to resolve disputes when an injured party files a complaint or a claim for rights. We the people are not governed except by contract and our Constitution. The courts and gummint officials are also governed by contract, by the Constitution and the limits of their authority.
Because the rest of the world wears red socks, it is not a reason to declare that we should wear red socks.
The judge you clerked for was targetted because he made decisions which the loser in that actual case didn't like. No?
The article said that Ginsberg and O'Connor were being singled out, and one has to assume that it was not by unhappy litigants, but by people who don't like their decisions for other reasons.
I would venture to guess that what they both have in common, in addition to being women, is support for legalized abortion.
BTW, O'Connor's not a Democrat.
Ginsburg is right. Some of the rhetoric used against allegedly "activist judges" has been over the top.
Where have you been? O'Connor's certainly a RINO at the very least. She was a horrible justice and a lib. She deserves no respect.
Turns out they were not directly threatened at all. Typical distortion and exaggeration from the drama queens on the REAL "irrational fringe" which REALLY threatens the court. Ruth Buzzi is a far more dangerous threat to do harm against America than some wacko blogger.
O'Connor voted with Rhenquist over 80% of the time.
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