If a socialist system of laws falls in the forest and no one cares, does it make a sound?
Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.
But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.
“One of our great exports used to be constitutional law,†said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had.â€
From 1990 through 2002, for instance, the Canadian Supreme Court cited decisions of the United States Supreme Court about a dozen times a year, an analysis by The New York Times found. In the six years since, the annual citation rate has fallen by half, to about six.
If I were French, I wouldn’t want their court system to bring up the SCOTUS any more than I want our system to bring up the French courts decisions.
Until they adopt the US Constitution and our list of amendments to it, we shouldn’t worry about these things.