Are SCOTUS justices swayed by foreign law?

The much-discussed flirtation of Supreme Court justices with foreign law and transnational standards is something they can seemingly turn on and off at will, argues CEI’s Iain Murray in a WSJ letter to the editor: “to allow more lawsuits, the Supreme Court disregarded every foreign court ruling defining the word ‘accident’ in the Warsaw Convention, in Olympic Airways v. Husain (2004)…. The Supreme Court regularly ignores the international consensus against punitive damages and broad discovery, which most of the world forbids in civil cases, but the U.S. permits.”

One Comment

  • No big deal.Foreign courts should be regularly ignored. The American experience is what we’re trying to define. I look overseas and see that Germany has privacy laws that exceed our own. Corrupt third-world countries practice a sort of lassie-fair capitalism. But the bile and excess coming out of Belgium is nothing to get excited about.