Glendon on citing foreign law

On the same matter referenced by Fr. Araujo, below -- i.e., using foreign-law materials in Supreme Court cases -- this op-ed piece, "Judicial Tourism," by Professor Mary Ann Glendon, might be of interest.  She writes:

There is, of course, no such thing as a "world community." As Eleanor Roosevelt and her fellow drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights well understood, universal rights are premised on the acceptance of a legitimate pluralism in forms of freedom. Human rights become real only when brought to life in concrete cultural settings. In our system, rights are protected not only by courts, but by the structure of our government--designed to give us citizens a say in the kind of society we wish to bring into being, limited only by constitutional text and tradition. But neither our design for government nor our model of judicial review has been widely copied. "International opinion" usually means the opinions of likeminded judges, academics and journalists who wish to use the courts to impose their vision of the good society. . . .

The problem is not reference to foreign law: It is how foreign law is used by judges who usurp powers reserved under the Constitution to the people and their elected representatives, and whose desire to "learn" is limited to finding arguments in support of conclusions that have little constitutional warrant. The learning process of the foreign law enthusiasts, moreover, is selective. They have shown no disposition to explore why most democracies take a different view from theirs on exclusion of illegally obtained evidence, regulation of abortion or separation of church and state. With reason, Justice Scalia accuses them of "looking over the heads of the crowd and picking out their friends."