Stay safe...resign today.
Sounds like Ginsberg is a victim.
Yup...she's a lib.
She probably dreamed up the whole thing.....while sleeping...on the bench.
Mm. Rough job. Better quit.
If she couldn't handle being a SCJ should would resign. If she thinks she has it bad, she should run for President.
Not that she's capable of recogizing cause and effect, of course.
It comes with the job, I'm sure President Bush receives more threats than any other political figure but you don't hear him whining. The courts deserve the criticism they get and in more principled times their lives would indeed be in danger if only from the threat of imprisonment.
Ole Ruthie is telling the truth here though.
She's brain dead. Disconnect the feeding tube.
Wait a minute. The left has loudly been proclaiming their "Patriotism" to all who will listen (and to many of us who would prefer not to). Maybe they are mad at Ruth 'Buzzi' Ginsberg because she has not done enough for their cause?
This harpy is not fit to be on any court. She goes to South Africa to spout her paranoid crap. Let them spend the money to protect her and her love of foreign law. Spit on her and her foreign law.
There must have been a time in this country that the supreme court justices didn't have to worry about these kind of threats in that they didn't render any opinions that remotely deserved that kind of attention.
Sounds like fear born of a guilty conscience to me.
Like hell she did. From the transcript:
http://www.concourt.gov.za/site/ginsberg.html
Another trenchant critic, Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, commented not long ago: “To cite foreign law as authority is to flirt with the discredited . . . idea of a universal natural law; or to suppose fantastically that the world’s judges constitute a single, elite community of wisdom and conscience.” Judge Posner’s view rests, in part, on the concern that U. S. judges do not comprehend the social, historical, political, and institutional background from which foreign opinions emerge. Nor do we even understand the language in which laws and judgments, outside the common law realm, are written.
Judge Posner is right, of course, to this extent: Foreign opinions are not authoritative; they set no binding precedent for the U. S. judge. But they can add to the store of knowledge relevant to the solution of trying questions. Yes, we should approach foreign legal materials with sensitivity to our differences, deficiencies, and imperfect understanding, but imperfection, I believe, should not lead us to abandon the effort to learn what we can from the experience and good thinking foreign sources may convey.
-- snip --
To a large extent, I believe, the critics in Congress and in the media misperceive how and why U. S. courts refer to foreign and international court decisions. We refer to decisions rendered abroad, it bears repetition, not as controlling authorities, but for their indication, in Judge Wald’s words, of “common denominators of basic fairness governing relationships between the governors and the governed.”
-- snip --
The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions, as my quotation from Chief Justice Taney suggested, is in line with the view of the U. S. Constitution as a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification. I am not a partisan of that view. U. S. jurists honor the Framers’ intent “to create a more perfect Union,” I believe, if they read the Constitution as belonging to a global 21st century, not as fixed forever by 18th-century understandings.
-- snip --
Returning to my main theme, I will recount briefly and chronologically the Supreme Court’s most recent decisions involving foreign or international legal sources as an aid to the resolution of constitutional questions. In a headline 2002 decision, Atkins v. Virginia, a six-member majority (all save the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia and Thomas) held unconstitutional the execution of a mentally retarded offender. The Court noted that “within the world community, the imposition of the death penalty for crimes committed by mentally retarded offenders is overwhelmingly disapproved.” (South Africa, of course, figures prominently in the worldwide disapproval, the Constitutional Court having held a decade ago that capital punishment in any case is unconstitutional.)
New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote of the following, 2002–2003, Term: The Court has “displayed a [steadily growing] attentiveness to legal developments in the rest of the world and to the [C]ourt’s role in keeping the United States in step with them.” Among examples from that Term, I would include the Michigan University affirmative action cases decided June 23, 2003. Although the Court splintered, it upheld the Michigan Law School program. In separate opinions, I looked to two United Nations Conventions: the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the United States has ratified; and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which, sadly, the United States has not yet ratified. Both Conventions distinguish between impermissible policies of oppression or exclusion, and permissible policies of inclusion, “temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality.” The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Michigan Law School case, I observed, “accords with the international understanding of the [purpose and propriety] of affirmative action.” (South Africa’s Constitution is clear on that matter; Section 9(2) provides: “To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.”)
A better indicator from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002–2003 Term, because it attracted a majority, is Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court in Lawrence v. Texas, announced June 26, 2003. Overruling a 1986 decision, Lawrence declared unconstitutional a Texas statute prohibiting two adult persons of the same sex from engaging, voluntarily, in intimate sexual conduct. (I think it highly unlikely, however, that we will soon see a U. S. Supreme Court decision resembling the very recent decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in Minister of Home Affairs v. Fourie.) On the question of dynamic versus static, frozen-in-time constitutional interpretation, the Court’s Lawrence v. Texas opinion instructs:
Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.
On respect for “the Opinions of [Human]kind,” the Lawrence Court emphasized: “The right the petitioners seek in this case has been accepted as an integral part of human freedom in many other countries.” In support, the Court cited the leading 1981 European Court of Human Rights decision, Dudgeon v. United Kingdom, and subsequent European Human Rights Court decisions affirming the protected right of homosexual adults to engage in intimate, consensual conduct...
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Ginsburg is so two-faced in this speech that it's hard to adquately put into words her mendacity.
[Over the past few months O'Connor has complained that criticism, mainly by Republicans, has threatened judicial independence to deal with difficult issues like gay marriage.]
I'm assuming she is also deeply concerned about the countless threats of violence against Republicans, especially President Bush, and how this Democratic Party encouraged hatred undermines our political process.
/sarcasm/
In the beginning of the article they actual state that the death threats were "apparently" spurred on by Republicans!!!!! That is truly outrageous.