Foreign law, “It’s so much more logical!”

While indulging my guilty pleasure (reading Ann Coulter if you must know,) I came across this quote:

“Nativism in American politics has become so rampant that it is considered scandalous in Republican circles for a judge to acknowledge paying any attention to foreign courts and their legal rulings.” — New York Times editorial, Aug. 3, 2010

The first thing that struck me was the snotty/sarcastic tone typical of pig-ignorant lefty intellectuals convinced of their intellectual superiority over us peons.

I say pig-ignorant because of the sheer cluelessness of how things work in our system, and the typical attribution of that ignorance to people who aren’t on the left.

Repeat after me once again: legislators legislate, judges judge.

Maybe we should break it down further for the hard of comprehension. Legislators pass laws, judges decide questions of law, and at the higher levels decide whether a law is compatible with the highest law of the land (little thing called the Constitution) which “cannot be changed by ordinary processes of legislation,” in Thomas Jefferson’s words.

(I’ve got that bit highlighted because when I quoted it once to an idiot college student she immediately responded, “Oh so you don’t think the Constitution should ever be changed!”)

This is NOT to say there are no good ideas in the laws of other nations, of course there are.* But in our system they should be adopted by legislation, not judicial or executive fiat.

The second thing that occured to me was the memory of a conversation I had with a French friend of mine when we were teens, lo these many years ago.

It was about the quaint Anglo-Saxon legal tradition of, “innocent until proven guilty.” My bud said in France once you’re arrested and charged – congratulations, you’re guilty unless and until you can prove yourself innocent.

“It’s so much more logical!” he explained.

Yep, I guess it is. If getting convictions is your goal.

Another charming foreign innovation we might consider is not from even that far from home. In England they treat libel suits a bit differently. Here truth is absolute proof against libel, i.e. if what you said is true – it ain’t libel.

Not so in the Mother Country. You can get sued down to your underwear for saying something perfectly true about someone. That’s what makes it such an attractive destination for libel tourism.

So I have to ask, do cosmopolitan citizens of the world who show your sophistication by reading the Grey Lady want a judge to decide to bring American law into compliance with these international norms?

Well I just called you pig-ignorant, so perhaps you do.

*There’s a great one from Sweden that could have saved us the creation of massive bureaucratic fumblydiddles, according to Robert Heinlein. He said the Swedes dealt with pollution of streams by simply requiring all industrial plants that use water and discharge waste into the streams have their intake downstream from their outfall. I don’t know it that’s actuallly the law in Sweden – but it’s a great idea.