{"id":5061,"date":"2009-05-06T22:39:55","date_gmt":"2009-05-07T03:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=5061"},"modified":"2009-05-06T22:48:04","modified_gmt":"2009-05-07T03:48:04","slug":"tribe-on-the-use-of-foreign-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2009\/05\/tribe-on-the-use-of-foreign-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Tribe on the Use of Foreign Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In an earlier post<\/a>, I outlined the basic themes of Laurence Tribe’s The Invisible Constitution<\/em>.\u00a0 One specific section that was of particular interest to me was Tribe’s defense of the use of foreign law in constitutional interpretation.\u00a0 I run into this controversial practice every spring when I teach Atkins v. Virginia<\/em>, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), and Roper v. Simmons<\/em>, 543 U.S. 51 (2005).\u00a0 Interpreting the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment, Atkins <\/em>banned execution of the mentally retarded, while Roper <\/em>outlawed the death penalty for juvenile defendants.\u00a0 In both cases, the majority drew intense criticism for citing foreign law in support of its holding.<\/p>\n

Based on Atkins <\/em>and Roper <\/em>anyway — I am admittedly not as familiar with some of the Court’s other uses of foreign law —\u00a0I think that Tribe is right about at least\u00a0two things.<\/p>\n

First, much of the criticism of the Court’s use of foreign law is overblown.\u00a0 Despite suggestions that American sovereignty itself\u00a0may be\u00a0threatened by citations to foreign law, I think it is hard to read such citations as anything more than an afterthought in either Atkins <\/em>or Roper<\/em>.\u00a0 Indeed, in Atkins<\/em>, the reference to foreign law is made only in passing in the middle of a long footnote.\u00a0 In Roper<\/em>, foreign law does get more textual play, but only after the Court has already completed its standard two-step Eighth Amendment analysis.\u00a0 (“Our determination that the death penalty is disproportionate punishment for offenders under 18 finds confirmation in the stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty.”)\u00a0 I like Tribe’s phrase for this (perhaps borrowed from Mark Tushnet): the justices are “using foreign sources to put icing on cakes that they insist have already been baked” (187).<\/p>\n

Second, I think Tribe is also right to suspect there are connections between jurisprudential “antiglobalism” and “the evidently rising national anxiety about immigration, the outsourcing of important economic activities to businesses and employees overseas, and the decline of American prestige abroad in the wake of the Iraq war” (186).\u00a0 Without some connection to deeper national preoccupations, it is hard to see why a few passsing references to foreign law have produced such an outpouring of outrage.<\/p>\n

To be sure, there is something rather awkward in the foreign-law references in Atkins <\/em>and Roper<\/em>, particularly when the opinions are set against the backdrop of the Court’s earlier Eighth Amendment cases.\u00a0 As it has attempted to regulate the politically popular death penalty through Eighth Amendment interpretation, the Court has obviously been quite sensitive to charges that it is merely enacting its own policy preferences.\u00a0 For that reason,\u00a0in its modern Eighth Amendment cases, the Court has repeatedly emphasized the use of “objective” indicia of national consensus.\u00a0 Usually, this means\u00a0little more than simply\u00a0counting the number of states that prohibit the challenged practice.\u00a0 This has always struck me as an odd way to decide the scope of an individual constitutional right; I would have thought such rights should function as constraints on majority will, not codifiers of majority will.\u00a0 In any event, the point is this: when the touchstone of Eighth Amendment analysis is counting states to decide “national consensus,” there is indeed something a bit jarring about following the state-counting with nation-counting — this seeems implicitly to suggest that foreign nations “count” as much as domestic states and\u00a0that foreign preferences are part of the “consensus” that the Eighth Amendment doctrine purports to codify.\u00a0 Framed this way, one can see some sort of basis — still much overblown, I think — for the sovereignty concerns.<\/p>\n

A more coherent approach to the Eighth Amendment — one, that is,\u00a0that does not purport to make individual rights a popularity contest — would result in less dissonance when foreign law is consulted.\u00a0 The sort of\u00a0reasoning suggested by Tribe might then have greater appeal\u00a0in the Eighth Amendment\u00a0context:<\/p>\n

[T]here is much to be said for learning from other nations and from the world community as we seek to flesh out the skeleton of basic human rights that has always undergirded our own Constitution’s protections for life and liberty, particularly given the strong evidence that the framers of the 1787 Constitution read widely and borrowed freely from the ideas of international law treatise-writers, and that they thought of themselves, as did those who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment nearly a century later, as protecting basic rights common to all humankind and not some peculiarly American set of rights and privileges. (183-84)\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an earlier post, I outlined the basic themes of Laurence Tribe’s The Invisible Constitution.\u00a0 One specific section that was of particular interest to me was Tribe’s defense of the use of foreign law in constitutional interpretation.\u00a0 I run into this controversial practice every spring when I teach Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-constitutional-interpretation","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}