The "enlightened" will guide us...

Big Trunk at Powerline has a don't-miss piece on the televised debate between Justices Scalia and Breyer on efforts to interpret our laws and Constitution based on "international opinion," as reflected in court decisions and legislative enactments in other countries. This is important, and it needs to be brought out into the light...

...I yield to no one in my regard for Professor Reynolds, but he misses the boat here. Justice Scalia made the same point in the debate, as the AP notes: "If justices believe foreign judgments are decisive on these moral cases, they should ban abortion since most other countries do so, Scalia said."

But no one imagines that liberal justices searching for "enlightened" world opinion will find it in statutes banning abortion, mandating capital punishment, etc., no matter how widespread such statutes may be. The diabolical nature of the "internationalist" school of Constitutional interpretation lies, in part, in the fact that there is no standard by which Supreme Court justices choose that facet of world opinion that is "enlightened," except their own prejudices...

"Diabolical" is a good word for it. The essence of being a Liberal is that one "knows" what is good for other people. And Liberals are maddeningly impervious to logical arguments to the contrary, because they are the "enlightened," they just know. The left has used the courts in this country to impose much of their agenda that they can't pass in "un-enlightened" legislatures and elections. The "internationalist" approach would cut the courts free from law and precedent and the Constitution, since they could always find some foreign law that fits what "enlightened" circles already think.

He quotes Breyer:

"U.S. law is not handed down from on high even at the U.S. Supreme Court," he said. "The law emerges from a conversation with judges, lawyers, professors and law students. ...

How clubby. How congenial. The law will "emerge" from conversations among the elite.