30 January 2007

Wikiprecedent

Remember the furore that the right wing kicked up when one of the US Supreme Court Justices, I think it may have been Justice Kennedy, suggested that the court should, in some cases, take into account legal rulings elsewhere such as Europe. Of course the ignore the fact that English Common Law has an almost equal bearing to the Constitution as the basis for American Law, a fact which probably explains why the founders didn't believe it was necessary to include an explicit right to habeaus corpus petitions in the Constitution as it was already a bedrock of Common Law. This also confused the US Attorney General as he demonstrated last week.

So how will they feel about US judges increases use of citations from Wikipedia in their opinions? I wait with bated breath.

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