Justice Anthony Kennedy has taken a lot of verbal abuse over the issue of citing international law and norms, especially as author of the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Roper v.Simmons, which ruled as unconstitutional the death penalty for juvenile offenders.
Dalia Lithwick has an essay, "Kennedy made me do it!", exploring conservative angst, today in Slate. LINK
Why is it that whenever conservatives behave stupidly, they blame it on Justice Kennedy? Liberals are equally capable of the stupidity. But they don't go around blaming Antonin Scalia for it.
Consider former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker. Apparently he didn't like Kennedy's majority opinion in Roper. Fair enough. But Parker didn't just express his disapproval, he urged his colleagues on the Alabama Supreme Court to ignore the Roper ruling altogether when they faced a substantially similar case last winter. He chose to talk to them about the matter in a January op-ed in the Birmingham News that reads less like legal argument than Fox News talking points. Urging his brethren to bypass Roper because it was "the unconstitutional opinion of five liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court," Parker wrote: "State supreme court judges should not follow obviously wrong decisions simply because they are 'precedents.' ... [A] judge takes an oath to support the Constitution—not to automatically follow activist judges who believe their own evolving standards of decency trump the text of the Constitution."
The Simmons decision is here.
Thanks to Howard Bashman at How Appealing for spotting this.
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