Our Proud Legal Heritage

TW: In these challenging times, we take certain American influences for granted. We also when a new SCOTUS justice is nominated get wrapped up in what ultimately almost always become trivialized discussions with little lasting impact. What has had a lasting impact though is the influence of American jurisprudence throughout the world. American judicial processes and legal predicates are not certainly the only global source of leadership but they are clearly the pre-eminent one. This is something about which to be proud but also about which to be mindful when the notion of American exceptionalism threatens to eclipse our collective good sense.

From NYT:
",,,picking a justice for the Supreme Court will have more ramifications for the republic than any cabinet secretary or ambassador.

The United States may be a comparatively young country, but its institutions have influenced the world profoundly. The constitutional ideals put forth upon its shores in the late 18th century guided the way other societies organized themselves, from the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen in France in 1789, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, to the constitutions of dozens of other countries emerging from colonialism and Communism. From the earliest times, as the historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote: Liberty to Americans meant, “first freedom under laws of their own making, and, second, the right to do anything that did not harm others.”

The U.S. Supreme Court was established in 1789, but drew on the experience of earlier state constitutions. Eighteenth century Americans had read John Locke who wrote “where law ends, tyranny begins,” and they were particularly mindful of setting up an independent judiciary, beholding to none, where abuses of power by kings and political leaders could not prevail. The early justices had robes of black and scarlet, but they agreed with Thomas Jefferson who urged that they “discard the monstrous wig which makes the English judges look like rats peeping through branches of oakum.”

For nearly 150 years the United States was practically “the only country with a written constitution enforceable as law,” according to Anthony Lewis, one of America’s most knowledgeable journalists writing about the law.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer says that “since W.W. II, however, there is a new interest throughout the world in written constitutions” with legal systems moving closer to the American model — “Germany, Spain, Italy, the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights” as well as countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Even France is moving toward a court that can review legislation similar to the U.S. model, according to Breyer.

As Israel’s Aharon Barak once put it, the tyrannies of the 30s and 40s showed that it was no longer possible to rely on the British phrase “it just isn’t done.” The law had to be enforced. Nelson Mandela called it a great day for post -apartheid South Africa when a free and impartial court reversed one of his decisions.

Even though they don’t have a written constitution, the British have created a new Supreme Court, and will be moving their law lords out of the House of Lords into the Middlesex Guildhall in Parliament Square. It is an effort to make the highest court judges more independent. Can the abandonment of judicial wigs be far behind? ..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opinion/19iht-edgreenway.html?scp=1&sq=hds%20greenway&st=cse