You can’t accuse him of dithering. It took just eight days for U.S. President Donald Trump to nominate Seventh Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett to take the still-warm seat of the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. If the spectacle of a nomination battle being fought out during an election season proves one thing, it’s that the court is political.
In American legal politics, one issue trumps all others: abortion. Little surprise, then, that Barrett’s likely position on the 1973 case of Roe v Wade that established a woman’s right to an abortion was being analyzed even before she was nominated. But abortion is only one of many pressing issues that ultimately end up before the court. Another perennial controversy is the status of “customary” international law in U.S. jurisprudence. For the people around the world who often find themselves subject to U.S. law while having no say in its formulation, the way the Supreme Court treats international law can be a matter of life, death, and billions of dollars.
