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GUN violence is a global epidemic that kills an estimated 1000 people a day and stronger international controls on the sale and movement of arms are needed, a report released today said. "If 1000 people a day were dying of avian flu, the world would sit up and take notice," said the report, published by IANSA, a group of agencies including Amnesty International and Oxfam. The report was released ahead of the United Nations Small Arms Review Conference, a summit of world leaders to discuss arms legislation that is held every five years and meets in New York next month....

Conservative legal scho;ars have long warned that judges' reliance on foreign opinions might undermine the mechanism for setting domestic policy under the Constitution. Now, for the second time, a friend of the court brief has been submitted to the Supreme Court by foreign politicians in a case relating to detainees at Guantánamo, suggesting that constitutional control over foreign policy could be similarly jeopardized. The case is Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, challenging the administration's military commissions for trying Guantánamo detainees. In the course of the litigation, a shifting group of "current and former members of the United Kingdom and European Union Parliaments"...

I’m talking today about the use of foreign law in American judicial opinions, and most of what I have to say is unfavorable, so I feel I should begin by pointing out that I am not a xenophobe. I don’t mind foreign law. In fact, in my years as a law professor, I used to teach foreign law. You don’t understand your own language until you’ve taken some foreign language, and I think you do not understand your own legal system—its distinctiveness, and what drives it—until you examine some other system. I do not take the position that foreign law...

PRESUMABLY, IT WAS NOT quite the debate Justice Ginsburg had in mind. But then, it's not clear that what she really wanted was a debate. Maybe we should have one, anyway.At the beginning of February, Ruth Bader Ginsburg traveled to South Africa, where she gave a public address on "The Value of a Comparative Perspective in Constitutional Adjudication." She defended the Supreme Court's recent practice of taking guidance from foreign law when interpreting the U.S. Constitution. She acknowledged that the practice has been criticized. She expressed concern at bills before Congress condemning the practice.Justice Ginsburg has given this sort of...

IN A SPEECH last month at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made some unfair insinuations about critics of the use of foreign law in American courts. Justice Ginsburg was defending what is, in our view, a perfectly defensible proposition: that American courts should "learn from legal systems with values and a commitment to democracy similar to our own." Yet in doing so, she managed to link those who take an opposing view to the legacies of slavery and apartheid and to paint them as "fuel[ing] the irrational fringe" in its threats against judges. ... ......

RUSH: Good old Justice Stephen Breyer is continuing to speak. We have some sound bites from him. He was speaking Monday in Washington at a symposium on public service and international law. Now, Breyer is a known commodity. He was a liberal when he was nominated; he was a liberal when he was confirmed, and he's a liberal on the court, and the liberals didn't have to be stealth about him, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg? She was a liberal when she's nominated, and she is a liberal on the court, and they didn't have to be stealth about her and...

Says decisions wouldn't be influenced by other nationsSupreme Court chief justice nominee John Roberts says his decisions will not be influenced by rulings or laws in other countries, despite a growing trend among other justices to pay more attention to foreign courts. In response to a question during his confirmation hearings this week by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., author of the WND Book "Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders into Insiders," Roberts agreed consideration of foreign legal precedents was inappropriate in making rulings in U.S. cases. "I do not think it's a good approach," Roberts said. Coburn, in setting...

Using Foreign Law Is The Real Supreme Court Test By Kevin Fobbs The Supreme Court may not continue to be the supreme court of the land if the judicial philosophy of Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer of using foreign law rulings in adjudicating American cases is permitted to become standard practice by the justices. Even as the confirmation battle rages over the US Senate hearing for D.C. Federal Appeals Court Judge John Robert's bid to become the next chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, there is another more pressing battle in our nation's capitol. Unfortunately...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that Americans can be prosecuted under U.S. wire fraud law for scheming to evade foreign taxes, ruling on a case about large quantities of liquor smuggled from the United States into Canada. By a 5-4 vote, the high court ruled against three convicted defendants, brothers David and Carl Pasquantino and accomplice Arthur Hilts, who argued that such prosecutions exceed the reach of the federal wire fraud law. *** "It may seem an odd use of the federal government's resources to prosecute a U.S. citizen for smuggling cheap liquor into...

WASHINGTON, April 1 - Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court embraced the practice of consulting foreign legal decisions on Friday, rejecting the argument from conservatives that United States law should not take international thinking into account. After a strongly worded dissent in a juvenile death penalty case from Justice Antonin Scalia last month that accused the court of putting too much faith in international opinion, Justice Ginsberg said the United States system should, if anything, consider international law more often. "Judges in the United States are free to consult all manner of commentary," she said in a speech...

Chief Justice Rehnquist said in his report on Friday that it had been clear since early in the country's history that "a judge's judicial acts may not serve as a basis for impeachment."

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

WASHINGTON - Justice Antonin Scalia (news - web sites) said Friday his colleagues on the Supreme Court will probably go on referring to foreign court decisions in their rulings on U.S. law but that doesn't make it right. Scalia generally opposes a greater role and influence for international law in American courts. While that view made him an unusual choice to speak to the American Society of International Law, Scalia said he welcomes the opportunity to engage his critics. "It is my view that modern foreign legal material can never be relevant to any interpretation of, that is to say,...