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The media is abuzz and hoping for a great battle. While most Americans are not particularly excited about the choice of a new Associate Justice for the Supreme Court, activists from the left and right, and those who report or comment on politics, are fired up. So it is a worthwhile exercise to separate some of the developing mainstream mythology about the current and future state of the Court from the reality. 1. Sandra Day O’Connor has not been the key swing justice. The liberal activists, Democratic senators and their media acolytes have been making the case that O’Connor has...

The great irony of America is that it has achieved so much public good by letting people simply tend to their private business. By contrast, the most disastrous social experiments of our age –Marxism and its less ambitious offspring-- have ruined so many private lives by holding the “public good” so high that no one life seemed to matter. But the public good is, in the end, nothing more than the sum of several million seemingly insignificant private lives. You cannot dispose of these individuals and their individual rights and somehow increase the public good. That is why last week’s...

U.S. Supreme Court says cities have broad powers to take property.

Foreign Law and the U.S. Constitution By Kenneth Anderson Kenneth Anderson is professor of law at the Washington College of Law, American University, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Email: kanders@wcl.american.edu. Website: http://kennethandersonlawofwar.blogspot.com. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Roper v. Simmons,1 which endorsed the use of foreign and international law in U.S. constitutional adjudication, has at least the virtue of putting everyone’s cards on the table. Until that decision was handed down (on March 1, 2005), it remained possible to view the appearance of foreign law in constitutional decisions as nothing more than a minor...

Please join me in writing your Congressman to ask for a Bill of Impeachment for Justice Breyer. -------------- Supreme Court citing more foreign cases. Scalia: Only U.S. views are relevant By Joan Biskupic USA TODAY "WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court's reference to foreign law in a ruling last month that overturned state anti-sodomy statutes stood out as if it were in bold print and capital letters. ..."full article------------ I'm "picking" on Justice Breyer because of his outspoken attitudes towards using foreign law, especially in his aired discussion with Justice Scalia. Justices debate use of foreign precedentsI sent this letter to...

Top of the fold -- Judicial Supremacists and the Despotic Branch... The U.S. Constitution suffered some serious setbacks this week. The future of liberty and the rule of law suffered likewise. It's bad enough that Democrat obstructionists are once again denying President George Bush's federal-bench nominees their constitutionally prescribed up-or-down vote by the full Senate. In a fine example of why we need those nominees on the bench, Leftists on the Supreme Court are, again, "interpreting" the so-called "living Constitution" as a method of altering that venerable document by judicial diktat. Worse yet, these Left-judiciary Supremacists -- Justice Anthony Kennedy...

In Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 5-4 yesterday that capital punishment is cruel and unusual punishment to those individuals who were under 18 when they committed the crime, and therefore, unconstitutional. Just 15 years ago the Supreme Court found that the statute in question was constitutional. However, they state that because 18 of the 38 states that have death penalty laws forbid executing minors (at the time of the crime), this represents an emerging national consensus. When will the courts begin interpreting the law rather than writing it? Additionally, they rattled off a list of foreign laws...

Tonight on c-span the will be a re-airing of a live event taped today at the American University. I watched the last hour of it and can vouche for it's interesting qualities. I plan to watch the complete version tonight. The discussion will about how should and how does foreign law influence the opinions and decisions of the courts in the USA.

Two U.S. Supreme Court justices debated whether foreign court rulings should influence their decisions, USA Today reported Friday. Antonin Scalia, appointed by President Reagan, and Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Clinton, debated the issue Thursday at Washington's American University. "We don't have the same moral and legal framework as the rest of the world, and we never have," said Scalia, who opposes looking to foreign rulings to decide U.S. cases. To which Breyer responded: "You can learn something" from foreign countries, adding that it is a matter of "opening your eyes to things that are going on elsewhere."

Scalia I thought has a policy against the media recording him, so this is interesting.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a major criminal law decision, a closely divided U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) ruled on Wednesday that federal judges no longer must follow the long-criticized sentencing guidelines in effect since 1987. The 5-4 ruling was a defeat for the U.S. Justice Department, which had defended as constitutional the federal sentencing guidelines that apply to more than 60,000 criminal defendants each year. Thousands of cases nationwide have been on hold awaiting a high court ruling. The decision, which makes the guidelines advisory instead of mandatory, was seen as the most important criminal law decision of...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- No one took any notice of the tall, slim man who appeared Tuesday for jury duty. Had he worn his black robe, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer no doubt would have drawn more attention. Even Marlborough, Mass., District Court Judge Thomas Sullivan Jr. didn't recognize Breyer until he read the justice's name on a document listing potential jurors for cases he was hearing. "When I looked at the slip I said, 'Oh, my God,"' Sullivan said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. Two cases were to be heard, one for drunken driving and another for...

The Supremes, after all, waded into the 2000 election only with great reluctance, and only in the face of gross judicial overreach: ..."the problem in 2000 was not that the U.S. Supreme Court acted politically but that the Florida Supreme Court did so — not once but twice." Today, five of the seven Florida Supreme Court judges from 2000 remain on the bench. In Ohio.... Then there's the fiasco-waiting-to-happen in Colorado — a ballot initiative that would turn the state from a winner-take-all to a proportional split of electoral college votes. If that had been in effect in 2000, Al...

STANFORD, Calif. (AP) - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said he wasn't sure he was being truly impartial when the high court was asked to settle the disputed 2000 presidential vote in Florida. Breyer - named to the court 10 years ago by President Clinton - was one of the dissenting votes in the 5-4 decision that canceled a controversial recount in Florida, sending Republican George W. Bush to the White House instead of Democrat Al Gore. "I had to ask myself would I vote the same way if the names were reversed," Breyer said Saturday at Stanford University...

With three weeks to Election Day, it is time for Republicans to close the deal with swing voters -- independents, Southern and Midwestern moderates, blue-collar households, Catholics, and Hispanics. The tactics of Senate Democrats and their liberal allies are now so nakedly partisan that the judiciary could well become the issue that wins tight Senate races and presidential battleground states for the GOP. (A secondary benefit of campaigning on this issue is that it establishes a clear "judiciary mandate" -- an advantage when addressing the Senate's rule for filibusters and a bonus when the time comes to nominate a Supreme...

A flap over foreign matter at the Supreme Court: House members protest use of non-U.S. rulings in big cases Mark Wilson / Getty Images file Justice Clarence Thomas, left, has clashed with Justice Stephen Breyer over whether the Supreme Court should refer to foreign legal precedents in death penalty cases. WASHINGTON - Stepping into a battle between the liberal and conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican House members are protesting the court?s increasing use of foreign legal precedents in interpreting the Constitution. Republican House members Tom Feeney of Florida and Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, joined by more than...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — Although Vincent W. Foster Jr., the Clinton administration's deputy White House counsel, killed himself more than 10 years ago, the controversy provoked by his death has yet to run its course. The Supreme Court heard arguments on Wednesday on whether the Freedom of Information Act obliges the government to make public the graphic photographs that the police took of the death scene in Fort Marcy Park in McLean, Va. The question was whether the release of the photographs, sought by a California lawyer who questions the official conclusion that the death was a suicide, would be...

O'Connor: U.S. must rely on foreign law Justice says, 'The impressions we create in this world are important' Posted: October 31, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com American courts need to pay more attention to international legal decisions to help create a more favorable impression abroad, said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor at an awards dinner in Atlanta. "The impressions we create in this world are important, and they can leave their mark," O'Connor said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The 73-year-old justice and some of her high court colleagues have made similar appeals to foreign law,...

<p>BOSTON — Mandatory minimum sentences are unfair and take away flexibility needed in the judicial process, said Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.</p> <p>"There has to be oil in the gears. ... There has to be room for the unusual or the exceptional case," he told about 550 people Sunday at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum (search).</p>

Supreme Court internationalists Posted: August 8, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com As if it weren't bad enough that the U.S. Supreme Court majority pays little heed to the U.S. Constitution, now it is becoming clear five or six members of the court are being influenced by the constitutions and courts of foreign countries. Ruth Bader Ginsburg blew the court's cover in a speech to the American Constitution Society, explaining that her colleagues are looking beyond America's borders for guidance in handling cases on issues like the death penalty and homosexual rights. In a decision earlier this summer in...