Justice Ginsburg call your office.

A German judge was asked by a Moroccan wife to grant a speedier divorce because her husband had beaten her in 2006 and, after being thrown out of the house, was threatening the wife's life.

In a stunning decision, the German judge

rejected the application for a speedy divorce by referring to a passage in the Koran that some have controversially interpreted to mean that a husband can beat his wife. . . . "The exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565 (of German federal law)," the daily Frankfurter Rundschau quoted the judge's letter as saying. It must be taken into account, the judge argued, that both man and wife have Moroccan backgrounds.^[1]

The judge was eventually removed from the case with the wife still now having to wait the entire year necessary for a divorce, there being no "hardship" exception under the said judge's ruling.

A German legislator made the appropriate observation:

The deputy floor leader for the Christian Democrats, Wolfgang Bosbach, [stated,] "This is a sad example of how the conception of the law from another legal and cultural environment is taken as the basis for our own notion of law," . . . .^[2]

It's pathetic enough that a European court official would consider the Koran as legitimate in any way. This case, however, is instructive on the position of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg whose stated willingness to "seek enlightenment from the laws and decisions of other nations"^[3] takes on new meaning in the light of this German example.

Is the German judge's opinion one of the one's she can take into account in deciding an American case? How are we to know which foreign decisions or laws are sufficiently worthy to Justice Ginsburg to use as instructions for us here at home?

The German judge thought it perfectly fine to bow before the authority of the Koran and permit its condonation, if not encouragement of wife beating to short circuit a proper analysis of whether a "hardship" existed under German law. It is, thus, no small thing to ask what opinions, laws, and decisions of "[human]kind" -- again with the stupid feminist locutions^[4] -- will be the ones that Justice Ginsburg favors us with in reaching her decisions.

As the German example shows, there's plenty of trash law out there that shouldn't be touched with a 10-foot pole. But all that the justice goes on about is "min[ing] with caution and restraint" and searching out "not as controlling authorities" but [indications] of "common denominators of basic fairness governing relationships between the governors and the governed."

The Justice wishes us to focus our gaze upon the heavens for the vast and noble lessons there to be discerned by thoughtful and prudent jurists. Jurists like herself, for instance.

Judging how that particular exercise can play out in pedestrian and very non-celestial venues and cases, we're reluctant to concede that anything but good old American laws are a fit study for American jurists deciding American cases in American court rooms involving American citizens and any other person subject to the jurisdicton of American courts.

Notes
^[1] "A German Judge Cites Koran in Divorce Case." By Veit Medick and Anna Reimann, Spiegel Online, 3/21/07.
^[2] Id.
^[3] "A decent Respect to the Opinions of [Human]kind": The Value of a Comparative Perspective in Constitutional Adjudication[.] Constitutional Court of South Africa." Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, 2/7/06.
^[4] The drafter and signers of the Declaration of Independence preferred to use "Mankind" but Justice Ginsburg has improved upon their language for us. Given their conceptual deficiencies in her eyes, perhaps it is fair to ask whether she is willing to consult our very own founding documents as a source of instruction on the "common denominators of basic fairness governing relationships between the governors and the governed." Somehow, we're not encouraged by her casual "improvement" of the language chosen by a certain Thomas Jefferson.