Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. That is not the job that she wants if this speech is any indication. Ginsburg desperately wants to be Queen of the United States. You say the United States has no queen? Well, that just won't do.

You can read some criticisms of Ginsburg's speech here, here and here.

I found the speech to be both lame and infuriating. Ginsburg's treatise to a group of South African lawyers was a defense of the relatively new practice of using rulings by foreign courts to determine what the Constitution says. Needless to say, her arguments are extremely weak.

Ginsburg pins her speech on the Declaration of Independence's statement about having "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Of course, the only mankind that Ginsburg thinks deserve that decent respect are ones that agree with her preconcieved notions (Justice Antonin Scalia often characterizes this as looking into a crowd and picking out your friends) -- you won't see Ginsburg consulting sharia (Muslim) law when determining what the constitution says about homosexual rights.

What the issue comes down to is this: The constitution is a legal agreement between the government of the United States and its citizens. When you have a judge factoring foreign law into his or her decisions on what the constitution says, the decision is no longer about the constitution, it's about the judge's personal preferences. Why? Because the two parties to the issue -- the government and the people -- haven't had any say in the foreign law or even agreed to consider foreign law in the first place.

Ginsburg's speech is a confession that she is not doing her job as a judge, but instead acting as a super-legislator.

That should be an impeachable offense, but it'll never happen.