Posted by Eugene Volokh:
International Law and the First Amendment::
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_05_29-2005_06_04.shtml#1117559166
I blogged about this in 2003, but this struck me as worth reposting,
given recent discussions of the Constitution and foreign law, and of
speech restrictions in other Western countries (emphasis added):
SIGNING TREATIES MAY ERODE THE BILL OF RIGHTS: American decisions
to sign on to international treaties may erode the protections of
the Bill of Rights, for instance the First Amendment. Yes, the
Supreme Court has supposedly said otherwise, in Reid v. Covert
(1957): "[N]o agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on
the [federal government] which is free from the restraints of the
Constitution" (speaking of the Bill of Rights). But it turns out
that this supremacy of the Bill of Rights really isn't that strong:
The President and the Senate can, in the long run, "insinuat[e]
international law" that would create "a partial displacement of
constitutional hegemony" (for instance, with "an international norm
against hate speech . . . supply[ing] a basis for prohibiting [hate
speech], the First Amendment notwithstanding"). "In the short
term," international norms would and should be "relevan[t] . . . in
domestic constitutional interpretation." But "In the long run, it
may point to the Constitution's more complete subordination."
These quotes are not from some anti-internationalist "The U.N. is
coming to take away our liberties" conservatives. They are from a
recent article by Prof. Peter Spiro, one of the leading American
international law scholars; the article, called Treaties,
International Law, and Constitutional Rights
, was published in 2003 in the Stanford Law Review, which is
generally seen as one of the top 3 legal journals in the country.
Prof. Spiro is both defending the notion that treaties should be
able to trump constitutional rights -- "If some constitutional
norms are more appropriately set at the international level" (and
he believes they are), "that should justify a treaty power that, in
some cases, overcomes even the Bill of Rights" -- and predicting
that treaties will over time do so. Courts, he acknowledges, would
try to "maintain[] the formal hegemony of the domestic
constitution," but "this formal hegemony may disguise a loss of
domestic constitutional autonomy over the long run."
"Constitutional rights 'adjusted' by treaty norms are changed by
them. The Constitution is read to conform with the treaty."
Of course, some people may be quite happy about this: They might
well conclude that parts of the Bill of Rights should be superseded
by "international" norms. They may think the international
lawmaking community (mostly, I suspect, composed of European legal
and political elites, plus of course those segments of American
legal and political elites that are involved in this field) will
indeed reach better results than those provided for by the current
understanding of the U.S. Constitution.
But those of us who disagree should vigilantly watch for, and
resist, the "displacement of constitutional hegemony" that the
article welcomes. We should insist that the President and the
Senate consistently stress in all the treaties they sign and ratify
that our agreement to the treaty is constrained by our
Constitution, and that the treaty should be read to conform to the
Constitution, and not the other way around. We should criticize
judges who rely on international norms in interpreting American
constitutional provisions (in this respect, reading Prof. Spiro's
article has led me to reconsider [1]some of my earlier views on the
subject, and to view with much more alarm reliance on international
law in American constitutional interpretation). And we should
assiduously publicize the ways in which international rules are, in
our view, worse than ours, for instance to show that foreign bans
on "hate speech" actually end up banning (as American First
Amendment thinking would have suggested) a good deal of speech that
deserves to be protected (see, for instance, [2]this post by David
Bernstein).
Our Constitution is far from perfect, both as written and as
interpreted. I think courts should indeed change their views on
many issues, and people should try to press courts to do so. But
this should be our decision as Americans. We should not cede our
control over our constitutional rights to international bodies,
international professional elites, or even to our own President and
Senate.
References
1. http://volokh.com/2003_08_03_volokh_archive.html#106019068381706270
2. http://volokh.com/2003_08_31_volokh_archive.html#106247022325040357
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