Listening to "like-minded" foreigners.

Here's a letter to the editor published in the NYT today, responding to an article titled "Justice Ginsburg Backs Value of Foreign Law." The letter writer (Kate Gluckman of Cambridge, Massachusetts), not only approves of the courts' citing foreign law in constitutional interpretation, but asserts that the Ginsburg "mirrors" the intent of the Framers. The letter writer claims that resisting citing federal law, as Justice Scalia advises, "only enhances the notion of the Bush administration that as an isolationist nation, we can continue to alienate our allies and undermine the authority of international institutions."

Perhaps by listening to the opinions of the "like-minded foreigners" that Justice Scalia views as a threat, we can avoid future foreign policy that has been executed on motives that now prove wrong, as the government's most authoritative analysis of the Iraqi threat was deemed to be.

A court interpreting the Constitution ought to take into account the extraneous concern about improving foreign affairs? Or is the letter writer just saying that politicians ought to take international opinion more seriously? Because that's not what Justice Scalia has been talking about. He's focused on deciding court cases. There really is a difference between court cases and government policy -- and I don't think Justice Ginsburg would say otherwise. Not everything is about Iraq.

And about that phrase "listening to the opinions of the 'like-minded foreigners'" -- it really is a conundrum! First, you decide who thinks like you, then, you listen to them. How is that done? Don't you need to listen to them to know if they think like you? If so, all you're doing is restating, in an obfuscatory way, what you already think. That has been one of Justice Scalia's basic points.