The U.S. judiciary should pay more attention to international court decisions to help enrich our nation's standing abroad, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said Tuesday."The impressions we create in this world are important and they can leave their mark," O'Connor said.
On the whole, the U.S. judicial system leaves a favorable impression around the world, she said "but when it comes to the impression created by the treatment of foreign and international law and the United States court, the jury is still out."
The 73-year-old justice, considered by many to be the most influential member of the nation's highest court, made her remarks to a dinner sponsored by the Southern Center for International Studies.
O'Connor received the Atlanta center's World Justice Award at the dinner at the Marriott hotel in Buckhead.
Former Georgia Court of Appeals Judge Dorothy Toth Beasley presented O'Connor with the award.
For decades, O'Connor said, U.S. courts declined to consider international law when reaching important decisions.
But in recent years, she said, the U.S. Supreme Court began acknowledging the thoughts of the global community.
The first such case was decided in 2002 when the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional to execute the mentally retarded, she said. In arriving at that decision, O'Connor said, the high court noted that the world community overwhelmingly disapproved of the practice.
Also influential was a court brief filed by American diplomats who discussed the difficulties confronted in their foreign missions because of U.S. death penalty practices, she said.
The second ruling cited by O'Connor was, as she called it, "the famous or perhaps infamous case," in which the Supreme Court overturned the Texas anti-sodomy law.
In that decision, the Supreme Court majority relied partly on a series of decisions by European courts on the same issue, O'Connor said.
"I suspect," O'Connor said, "that over time we will rely increasingly, or take notice at least increasingly, on international and foreign courts in examining domestic issues."
Doing so, she added, "may not only enrich our own country's decisions, I think it may create that all important good impression."