If one considers her reasoning for eliminating US Con Law at Harvard, one can conclude that she does. It’s quite possible that the President Obama’s nominee for SCOTUS feels that we should have a system that can.

In the press release fron Harvard Law that announced the school’s elimination of US Constitutional Law as a requirement, Kagen said this:

“From the beginning of law school, students should learn to locate what they are learning about public and private law in the United States within the context of a larger universe — global networks of economic regulation and private ordering, public systems created through multilateral relations among states, and different and widely varying legal cultures and systems. Accordingly, the Law School will develop three foundation courses, each of which represents a door into the global sphere that students will use as context for U.S. law,”

Kagen is indicating in this published statement that she advocates using foreign law as justification in rulings and application. Justice Kennedy already does so. Justice Sotomayor’s writings confirm the same.

Kagen’s assention to the Court would mean that there are at least three SCOTUS justices whom have no trouble using foreign law in their rulings.

No reasonable person believes that any of the three advocate Sharia. But their on the record views which open the door for the consideration of foreign law is US courts is a slippery slope. It’s a slope that ultimately offers the kind of parallel arguments that justify the application of Sharia as what Kagen refers to as “varying legal cultures and systems” in our courts.

So it is a question of judicial judgement. Does the nation want judges whom consider balancing foreign law or something as repulsive as Sharia against the Constitution? Furthermore, do we even want the conditions to exist within our courts that such arguments could be presented before the bench in the first place?

Currently, we already have two such justices on SCOTUS whom already do in Kennedy and Sotomayor. Do we want a third in Kagen?

Perhaps we now know what it is in judges that Obama is seeking and is why he selected Kagan instead of a far more respected and experienced jurist like Diane Wood of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Willingness to cite foreign law in our courts provides that kind of leverage Obama desires for the kind of judicial activism he applauds. He’s found kindred spirits in such activism in both Sotomayor and Kagen.

Posted under OBAMA WATCH, Uncategorized