Which Supreme Court Justice Are You?

[Guinevere]

No qualifiers, no exceptions.; nothing about "unless of course the Constitution and laws of the United States conflict with some rule passed by some bunch of foreigners"...

The members of the US Supreme Court are duty bound to make their decisions based on "the Constitution and laws of the United States" not based on "international law". If there is a conflict between the two, it is "the Constitution and laws of the United States" that trumps. (No pun intended)

If they do otherwise, they are in violation of their oath of office, and impeachment and removal would be entirely appropriate.

We are not like EU members who have surrendered their sovereign right to the supremacy of their laws to some foreign body...

Here are the options for the question "Do you think international law is relevant when deciding questions of American law?"

• ◌ Yes! International law can offer valuable persuasive authority.
  ◌ I’m not sure how I feel about this issue.
  ◌ Blank stare.
  ◌ Never! Only American opinions should matter to American courts.

Note the first option (the one I selected) talks about offering "persuasive authority", not "blindly following somebody else's rules".  Your option (the last one) is more along the lines of "we'll do it our way come hell or high water".   The other two are basically "no comment" and "Duhhh?" and were probably included so that the question had four options like the rest of them.

Now there is nothing wrong in and of itself about option four — and sometimes that is the way it should or must be done.  But take a look at how many different 'interpretations' of the twenty-seven words that make up the text of the Second Amendment have been offered over the years.  In any case where there are questions about the interpretation of the law and/or the Constitution — and isn't that the reason these cases are in front of the SCOTUS in the first place? — what harm is there in looking to see how other countries or the international community on the whole looks at this?  No one is saying that one is going to blindly follow Sharia law or the totalitarian "justice" of nations like North Korea.  However, any input increases the knowledge on which a decision is based, and my way of thinking is that the more knowledge upon which to base the decision the better.

-"BB"-

BB is close to the truth.

Persuasive authority from other jurisdictions is helpful when there is no US law on point, and believe me, that happens more times than you might think. Besides, our entire system is linked back to ENGLISH common law.

[Scooter]

No one has ever used or even suggested using the law of other jurisdictions in a way that conflicts with the Constitution and laws of the United States, that is a red herring. The question is whether the law of other jurisdictions can ever be used to illuminate an issue before a U.S. court in a way that is consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States, and of course it can and should be, particularly when the law of that jurisdiction shares a common root with the law of the United States, and when the law of the United States is otherwise silent on the issue.

A great example was the decision legalizing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. The Supreme Judicial Court found that barring same-sex marriage was a violation of the state constitution, and was then faced with the choice of invalidating the marriage statute in its entirety, or fashioning a remedy to allow same-sex marriage. With no precedent in U.S. law, the Court looked to a decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal earlier that year. Noting that both Ontario and Massachusetts inherited the English common law definition of marriage as the voluntary union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, the Court saw the Ontario Court's refinement of the definition ("the voluntary union of two persons...") as achieving the intended remedy in a way that was "entirely consonant with established principles of jurisprudence."

An approach to jurisprudence that says "only American opinions should matter to American courts" would have precluded such an approach, and with no precedents on which to rely, would have increased the probability that the Court would have had to void the marriage statute, perhaps invalidating every marriage in the state along with it.