Globalism doesn't mean just accepting foreign countries' products and people across our borders. U.S. Supreme Court justices are beginning to manifest a curious fascination with foreign legal systems, too.

Speaking at Georgetown University on Oct. 26, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told the audience that international law "is vital if judges are to faithfully discharge their duties." She was dedicating Georgetown's new international law center.

 "International law is a help in our search for a more peaceful world," O'Connor declared in her address, omitting to mention that every attempt to use international law and leagues has been an abysmal failure in preventing war. Besides, the U.S. Constitution gives Congress, not the Supreme Court or any international body, the authority to declare war.

Efforts to import international law into the United States have nothing to do with preventing war. The purpose is to change our Constitution without obtaining approval of the American people through the amendment process.

  The Supreme Court recently accepted amicus briefs from Mikhail Gorbachev, the last head of the former Soviet Union, and 48 other countries in a case considered this fall involving the death penalty for juveniles, Roper v. Simmons. You read that right; the high court is listening to Gorbachev's opinion about U.S. criminal law.

The justices have increasingly cited foreign law to try to undo the death penalty, even though the U.S. Constitution in several places expressly recognizes its legality. However, the justices are very selective about which countries they cite, because executions are common in many countries.

Nor do the judges cite stricter abortion laws around the world as they strike down state and congressional bans on partial-birth abortion.

 Earlier this year, the Supreme Court allowed the Commission of the European Communities for the first time in history to present oral arguments as a friend of the court. This body was not even a party in the dispute between Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices, yet the justices granted it a special right to argue that is rarely conferred even on American entities.

The Supreme Court's famous sodomy ruling, Lawrence v. Texas, which encouraged the current push toward same-sex marriage licenses, was based on references to the European Court of Human Rights and other foreign sources as examples of "emerging awareness" about sex. But that opinion, written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, conveniently omitted any reference to countries such as India, where homosexual behavior is a crime meriting imprisonment.

In her Georgetown speech, O'Connor said, "We operate today under a very large array of international agreements, treaties, organizations." Such language is reminiscent of former President Bill Clinton's statement to the United Nations that he was pushing the United States into a "web of institutions and arrangements" for "the emerging international system." Continued...