The background for this is that the legal elites of America and other Western nations attend the same conferences and swim in the same intellectual waters. At the conferences, Americans, including our Supreme Court justices, are attacked as insular and parochial for not adopting European and new international or transnational standards.

This pressure is not just to pull away from American law and the Constitution. Often it is also a push toward standards out of sync with American traditions of liberty. The European version of free speech is so frighteningly narrow that a major push is under way to criminalize criticism of homosexuality.

The courts of several Western nations have moved to interpret their own constitutions in the light of international conventions, U.N. treaties and other similar materials. This is a dicey proposition because so much of these materials are produced by U.N. bureaucrats and powerful U.N. non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with little publicity and almost no democratic input.

The NGOs, most of them American, are predominantly far out on the cultural left. They specialize in producing non-binding and apparently harmless documents that they work to convert into explosive and legally binding texts that undermine national sovereignty and democratic procedures. This is not a system that deserves a nod of respect from Supreme Court justices.