Saying “No” To Another Flowers Fraud On Koh

(And I also posted here.)

I really didn’t like this column when it was written for the Philadelphia Inquirer last week by Former Senator Man-On-Dog (and by the way, why am I not surprised by this?), and I like it even less today after seeing that it has been regurgitated by Christine Flowers in The Daily News.

Specifically, stuff like what follows, in a criticism of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had the temerity in Flowers’ view to note that our jurists should consider the rulings of international courts in their deliberations (and it is a continual source of astonishment to me that Flowers can concoct this drivel, given that she is a lawyer – and try not to laugh too hard as you read about her supposed defense of the Constitution, seeing as how she’s made a career of providing cover for our previous ruling cabal)…

Ginsburg apparently doesn't believe in the supremacy of the Constitution because to do so would apparently be arrogant. She implied that the failure to consider the reasoning of foreign judges diminished the importance of the Supreme Court, although she didn't give details other than to say that the Canadian high court is "cited more widely abroad than the U.S. Supreme Court," and she made the telling observation that "you will not be listened to if you don't listen to others."

Ah, so that's it. We have to play nice in the international legal sandbox so that other people will pay us some respect. Ginsburg and her legal eagles apparently believe that the law is like a popularity contest and the system with the most friends wins.

Well, I would say that that is precisely the attitude that had led to the following development, as the New York Times noted here from last year…

“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.”

From 1990 through 2002, for instance, the Canadian Supreme Court cited decisions of the United States Supreme Court about a dozen times a year, an analysis by The New York Times found. In the six years since, the annual citation rate has fallen by half, to about six.

Australian state supreme courts cited American decisions 208 times in 1995, according to a recent study by Russell Smyth, an Australian economist. By 2005, the number had fallen to 72.

The story is similar around the globe, legal experts say, particularly in cases involving human rights. These days, foreign courts in developed democracies often cite the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in cases concerning equality, liberty and prohibitions against cruel treatment, said Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of the Yale Law School. In those areas, Dean Koh said, “they tend not to look to the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The rise of new and sophisticated constitutional courts elsewhere is one reason for the Supreme Court’s fading influence, legal experts said. The new courts are, moreover, generally more liberal than the Rehnquist and Roberts courts and for that reason more inclined to cite one another.

And if you guessed that Dubya and his playmates have had something to do with this also, specifically on the matter of torture, then you win the complete “24” anthology on DVD, with a bonus feature of “Jack Bauer’s Most Violent Interrogations.”

And speaking of Koh…

President Obama's nominee for top legal dog at the State Department, Harold Koh, believes that Islamic sharia law could be applied in American jurisdictions in "appropriate cases."

As noted here, that is a flat-out lie.

The urban legend that Koh said that Sharia law could be applied in “appropriate cases” was propagated by a guy named Steven Stein based on a speech Koh gave to the Yale Club of Greenwich. As Jed Lewison notes in the post, Robin Reeves Zorthian, President of the Yale Alumni Association of Greenwich, wrote a letter to the New York Post (where the story originated – figures) saying that that item in the story by Meghan Clyne was “totally fictitious and inaccurate.”

Memo to Brian Tierney and Philadelphia Newspapers – maybe you guys wouldn’t be losing so much money if you bothered to do a little fact-checking and tell the truth instead every once in awhile (and needless to say, tell Flowers to peddle her drivel elsewhere and hire a respectable columnist in her place).