Andy McCarthy writes: [my bolding]
Ed Whelan's Bench Memos series on Yale Law School
Dean Harold Koh's jurisprudence of transnationalism is absolutely
essential reading.
Dean Koh has been nominated to be the legal adviser to the Obama State Department. I posted a response here in the Corner on Saturday to Ted Olson's endorsement of Koh and intimation that opposition should be construed as an attack on the nominee's integrity and intellect. As I said, that is most decidedly not the case.
This is a vitally needed debate about policy: in particular, about whether the covenant between the American people and their government — our very existence as a self-determining nation — should be eradicated in favor of a post-sovereign arrangement in which we are ruled by federal judges and unelected international bureaucrats imposing international law as continuously "evolved" by law professors and Leftist NGOs.
Here in the Corner, Ed has just posted some of Dean Koh's astounding views on what he regards as America's troubling "narcissism" on such fundamental rights as free-speech. The Bench Memos posts (three so far) can he found here, here, and here.
Me: Ed Whelan has now posted a 4th memo here.
Later: More from Whelan:
Nothing to Fear from Transnationalists? [Ed Whelan]
On the Volokh Conspiracy, law professor Eugene Volokh builds on my Corner post this morning about Harold Koh’s “opprobrium” for America’s “distinctive rights culture,” which gives “First Amendment protections for speech and religion . . . far greater emphasis and judicial protection in America than in Europe or Asia.” As I did, Volokh sees in Koh’s article a danger that the international norms that transnationalists favor could be used to “reduce the scope of American constitutional rights.” Indeed, Volokh quotes another transnationalist scholar who celebrates the prospect that transnationalism “may point to the Constitution’s more complete subordination” to international norms.
Meantime, another of Koh’s defenders disparages my arguments while utterly failing to engage them.