Remember RWers blasting Ginsburg et al for considering foreign law?

[coda]

Will they blast Thomas and Scalia, too?


Doesn't matter if you agree with this Supreme Court decision or not, it's not the point here.

A guy had a weapons conviction in Japan and didn't report it on a US Fed form (for buying guns) that asked if he had a weapons conviction in any court.

The case rested on what the meaning of "any court" is.

The moderates decided "any court" means domestic US court, their reasoning being that people with convictions from other countries may not have had the procedural protections that we have here, meaning our sovereign law trumped a foreign conviction (in this case).

Thomas' dissent, with Scalia and Kennedy concurring, says that "any court" includes foreign courts.

Point being that if the US accepts convictions from foreign courts, that is an acceptance of foreign law.

So are Phyllis Schlafly, DeLay, and the rest of the goon squad going to be even-handed and attack Arch Conservatives Thomas and Scalia, for their acceptance of foreign law, and blatant attempt to throw away our sacred sovereignty? :)

I'll bet they don't.

Schlafly and her ilk asked for "removal/impeachment" of Kennedy, if I remember correctly.


--

April 26, 2005, 10:05AM

Supreme Court rules in favor of gun owner
Associated Press

WASHINGTON —

<snip>

In a 5-3 decision, the court ruled in favor of Gary Sherwood Small of Pennsylvania. The court reasoned that U.S. law, which prohibits felons who have been convicted in "any court" from owning guns, applies only to domestic crimes.


Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the majority, said interpreting the law broadly to apply to foreign convictions would be unfair to defendants because procedural protections are often less in international courts. If Congress intended foreign convictions to apply, they can rewrite the law to specifically say so, he said.


"We have no reason to believe that Congress considered the added enforcement advantages flowing from inclusion of foreign crimes, weighing them against, say, the potential unfairness of preventing those with inapt foreign convictions from possessing guns," Breyer wrote. He was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas (joined by Scalia and Kennedy) argued that Congress intended for foreign convictions to apply. "Any" court literally means any court, he wrote. "Read naturally, the word 'any' has an expansive meaning, that is, 'one or some indiscriminately of whatever kind,'" Thomas said.



The Bush administration had asked the court to apply the statute to foreign convictions.



more.....

The case is Small v. United States, 03-750.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3154074

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

1. Isn't the Bible a "foreign" document...I mean, technically, it is.

It wasn't written in English in its first release, right?????

[coda]

2. Yep

And after the American Revolution, English common law was fully embraced.