Scalia the Internationalist

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | February 16, 2016

Kudos to Julian Ku at Opinio Juris for correcting the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s detractors and touting the jurist’s authentic approach to the relationship between the Constitution and international law:

It is odd to criticize Scalia for rejecting the use of foreign and international law in constitutional interpretation. Unless one could show that foreign and international law was relevant to determining the original meaning of the constitution’s text, Scalia believed it was irrelevant. And so he criticized judges who relied upon such sources, just as he criticized them for relying upon their own personal preferences or on what he thought were simply the latest intellectual or social fads.

Secondly, Scalia was actually one of the most cosmopolitan members of the Supreme Court. Few justices enjoyed foreign travel more, and he was always willing to go abroad to lecture at foreign law schools or in front of foreign bar associations. Indeed, he was in Hong Kong just last week giving lectures and he had planned to teach in France this summer.

More importantly, Scalia was not afraid or contemptuous of international law when that was the governing law in a case before him. Indeed, when he started law teaching at the University of Virginia, comparative law and private international law were his primary research and teaching interests. And as Duncan pointed out in a post back in 2007, Justice Scalia was not unwilling to interpret statutes to conform to international law or treaties, nor was he unwilling to rely upon foreign judicial opinions interpreting international treaties. He did not think foreign judicial decisions or international law was irrelevant or meaningless. He simply objected, on grounds of intellectual consistency, to using those sources when interpreting the U.S. Constitution.

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