Why the law is foreign to Ginsberg

RenewAmerica.Us ^ | 4/27/09 | Selwyn Duke

[ReformationFan]

There is an old saying, "A man who is capable of deceiving only others is not nearly as dangerous as a man who is capable of deceiving himself." Truer words were never spoken. When a person lies, he is deceiving others about reality, but at least knows he is engaging in deception. But when someone rationalizes — which is when you lie to yourself — he is truly lost. He then not only bends reality for others as a by-product of bending it for himself, but he can render untruths without having to lie. This is because a lie is when you tell an untruth knowing it's untrue. It's much like when the ever-prevaricating George Costanza character on Seinfeld gave his advice for beating a polygraph machine, "just remember . . . it's not a lie if you believe it."

I think of this when I hear Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsberg tout the use of foreign law by American judges sworn to uphold the Constitution — that would be our constitution. Speaking about this recently at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, she said,

"I frankly don't understand all the brouhaha lately from Congress and even from some of my colleagues about referring to foreign law [when handing down court rulings] . . . ."

Well, you know what? I believe her. She and her fellow travelers really don't understand. That is, they don't grasp the correct legal philosophy well enough to understand what they're rejecting.

[ReformationFan]

Selwyn Duke's latest on Justice Ruth "Gator" Ginsburg(as Michael Savage calls her in The Political Zoo)

[DeLaine]

ping for later

[nathanbedford]

I believe Goldberg wants to be able to consult foreign jurisprudence because she is a God player who wishes to arrange the world to please herself. She is in an especially good position to do that on the Supreme Court but intellectual respectability requires that she find justification for what she wants to do. Her syllogism is always to rationalize backward from her prejudice.

In addition to intellectual respectability our system requires that the court pretend that it is discovering legal principles and not creating them at whim. The tradition says that those principles should be found in an organic but coherent body of law going back to the Magna Carta and building a great Anglo-Saxon tradition that one case is right because it is congruent with other cases which preceded it. So when a Justice argues that she is properly interpreting a clause of the Constitution she must justify the result she seeks by playing the game. Justice Scalia seeks to circumscribe her options to the original intent of the document as understood by those who framed it and ratified it or amended it. Justice Scalia thinks that you ought to illuminate your understanding of original intent by having it informed by the body of Anglo-Saxon case law which tells us the meaning of the phrases which we are now trying to interpret as they were understood at the time of drafting or amending.

Justice Scalia thinks a deal is a deal. Justice Ginsburg thinks it's an inconvenience.

As a rank god player, Justice Ginsburg finds any constraints on her ability to arrange the world to be repugnant so she seeks to widen her field of inquiry into the whole world until eventually her patience is rewarded and she can find something to justify her own original intent.

[H.Akston]

This quote describes the worst possible president. This leads me to wonder - what describes the best? I would submit that, from best to worst, at every election, we chance ending up with a president who:

A. Truly believes in doing the right things.
B. Fakes believing in doing the right things.
C. Fakes believing in doing the wrong things.
D. Truly believes in doing the wrong things.

Note the trend:

A. Reagan
B. Bush*
C. Clinton
D. Obama

C is the most dishonest, and D is the worst for the country.

*pick your Bush

I hope it’s a loop, and after D there’s an A, because Carter could have been the D before Reagan.