Justifying the Use of International Human Rights Principles in American Constitutional Law

This article focuses on the justification of the use of principles in the U.S. constitutional law. The analytic condition requires that there exist a common normative language capable of equating established meanings of settled American constitutional law with newly developing understandings of various conventions of international human rights by both the domestic courts of other nations and the International Court of Human Rights. The normative condition requires that the values comprising this common language provide a minimal set of basic standards to prevent excessively restrictive interpretations of American constitutional doctrine. The first concern is thus to set out a discourse in which common meanings are recognized. The second is to prevent constriction or devaluation of those settled rights American constitutional law already recognizes. Current debates in the literature raise questions concerning, among other issues, whether allowing judges to consider extraterritorial and international law sources will open the door to their reading into American constitutional law their own idiosyncratic moral points of view.