Last month the state of North Carolina became the seventh state to pass legislation that prohibits state judges from considering Islamic law when deciding cases. The other states are Oklahoma, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, South Dakota and Tennessee. North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory allowed the law to take effect without signing it, saying he considered the measure a waste of time. Naturally, there are those who disagree with passing such a measure. Deseret News reported the story.
Supporters hailed the bill as an important safeguard that protects the American legal system from foreign laws that are incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, Religion News Service reported, while critics argued the Constitution already overrides foreign laws.
“(The legislation is) primarily designed to stir up anti-Islamic prejudice by creating fears that Islamic Sharia law is somehow going to take over the American legal system,” Carl Ernst, a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina, told the Daily Tarheel.
“No one has a problem with Muslims or anyone else living peaceably in America,” the Rev. Mark Creech said in an article published on the Christian Action League website. “But on U.S. soil, we must all embrace the freedoms and responsibilities assigned us via the Constitution, and not demand enforcement of rules and regulations left behind in other cultures.”
When Oklahoma passed an Amendment to the State Constitution that prohibits Oklahoma judges from considering foreign law, some who opposed its passage said it was not necessary because there has never been a case where that happened. I completely disagree with the notion that you have to wait until something begins happening before making it illegal.
One need look no further than our own Supreme Court to see that there are judges who are open to considering foreign law. Justice Stephen Breyer was speaking at Johns Hopkins University in 2010 and said, “If judges in another country with similar laws have a similar case, a judge should be able to consider how they solved it.” And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said, “Why shouldn’t we look to the wisdom of a judge from abroad with at least as much ease as we would read a law review article written by a professor?”
Judges who are unable to reach a Constitutional decision based on established American law should be removed from the bench. To even consider reviewing a foreign case as guidance for a decision is to subject plaintiffs and defendants to the whims of foreign judges who made their decision based on their own laws, not American laws. It is no surprise to me that Breyer and Ginsburg are proponents of considering foreign cases. The left has always promoted ‘global community’ with ‘open borders’ and it therefore follows that the American judicial process would be corrupted by such thinking. The people in North Carolina have taken steps to reject this notion. Other states should follow theirs and Oklahoma’s examples. Rev. Creech is correct. If people choose to come and live in the United States they should not expect to live under the laws they left behind, anymore than if I were to move to Saudi Arabia and expected to live under the laws here in Oklahoma. Without even considering all the implications of allowing Sharia law here in the United States, allowing any kind of foreign law to be considered would be a cancer on our judicial system that would undermine American jurisprudence.
Kudos to North Carolina. I wonder how long it will take Muslims to file a lawsuit, as they did in Oklahoma? I hope it’s written better than the Oklahoma statute. It didn’t take a judge long to strike it down.
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a lawsuit hasn’t already been filed and it just hasn’t made the news yet.