Tuesday.....International.....International Law And You

One of the concerns with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is the attempt today, by some judges, to take international judicial decisions into account as if they are a precedent of sort. The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on this tendency in today's paper and can be accessed at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1247530852583358.html. To even consider doing this is revealing in that it shows that the particular judge believes that our law is only one reference to take into consideration in making judicial decisions, along with the laws of other nations and as we have seen of late, the empathy the particular judge may hold. A while back I wrote that the best thing we could do with the Sotomayor nomination was to turn the hearings into a teaching tool for the American public on the role of judges and the encroaching activist judge that attempts to set policy rather than interpret law. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama is doing an excellent job bringing this out. The next Supreme Court judge will sit on the court for life and it would be little comfort after a number of years of bad decisions to say Well, at least the few days of hearings on their nomination were not contentious! An editorial in the same paper was also revealing. We have all heard of people who put money into Swiss bank accounts, and some reasons for it. The IRS, Timothy Geithner's IRS, has come up with an idea. The IRS and Eric Holder's Justice Department are petitioning the Swiss bank UBS to turn over the names of 52,00o Americans with accounts in Switzerland. Currently, if there is evidence of tax fraud, the Swiss will comply and help with the information. Otherwise, the Swiss have bank-secrecy laws and the United States would be asking the Swiss to break their own laws. Again this is revealing in that one of the concerns on "radical liberalism leading to Fascism" is that when they attain power, Katie bar the door, they look like a hyperactive seven year old swinging at a Pinata. The WSJ article also points out that this could also run afoul of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search.