"...and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures. Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eighth Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent."
Modernist-man (like a lot of lawyers) is a judicial supremacist. They can pretty do whatever they want as far as he is concerned (unless of course it has something to do with religion). The problem for him is that better lawyers than he have been noting the trend of justices citing foreign law as a serious problem, not something that happens all the time and something we should just forget about. I'll take their word over his.