Backwater

by digby

Atrios writes:

Yglesias:
Who knew the “Washington Consensus” would die in Washington, DC under a Republican President in a mad fit of bailouts and nationalizations?
And who imagined it that when it would die, its death would be confronted with deafening silence. Oh I miss the good old days when lecturing Latin American countries for their bad economic policies was what all the cool kids did.

I’m sure the rest of the world is quite relieved that the US is no longer in a position to lecture them endlessly on fiscal responsibility. Of course, other nations are no longer impressed with much of anything we do, and for good reason:

Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War. But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices. “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 adamant opposition of some Supreme Court justices to the citation of foreign law in their own opinions also plays a role, some foreign judges say. “Most justices of the United States Supreme Court do not cite foreign case law in their judgments,” Aharon Barak, then the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 2002. “They fail to make use of an important source of inspiration, one that enriches legal thinking, makes law more creative, and strengthens the democratic ties and foundations of different legal systems.” Partly as a consequence, Chief Justice Barak wrote, the United States Supreme Court “is losing the central role it once had among courts in modern democracies.” Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia said that his court no longer confined itself to considering English, Canadian and American law. “Now we will take information from the Supreme Court of India, or the Court of Appeal of New Zealand, or the Constitutional Court of South Africa,” he said in an interview published in 2001 in The Green Bag, a legal journal. “America” he added, “is in danger of becoming something of a legal backwater.”

Read the whole article. It discusses in some length the know-nothingness of the conservatives on the courts and the extent to which the conservative movement is determined to make the United Sates a pariah nation.

But that’s because we’re so special:

In “ ‘A Shining City on a Hill’: American Exceptionalism and the Supreme Court’s Practice of Relying on Foreign Law,” a 2006 article in the Boston University Law Review, Professor Calabresi concluded that the Supreme Court should be wary of citing foreign law in most constitutional cases precisely because the United States is exceptional. “Like it or not,” he wrote, “Americans really are a special people with a special ideology that sets us apart from all the other peoples.”

We’re special alright. We’re a powerfully rich, militarily dominant nation which is led by a bunch of backwater neanderthals.

If this keeps up, one of these days a bunch of countries are going to get it in their heads that we are a danger to the planet and start thinking about ways to stop us.

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