In his May 1, 2011, televised address, President Barack Obama reported "to the American people and to the world that the United States ha[d] conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden." (4) President Obama initially detailed little beyond noting that he had directed "the[n] Director of the CIA [Leon Panetta], to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda" and that the operation, carried out by a "small team of Americans" was done "at [his] direction [as President]." In the following days, senior executive branch officials garrulously provided explicit details, from the now-iconic White House Situation Room photograph to intricate diagrams of the Abbottabad compound and the assault force's composition.
Maybe not as garrulously as the Irish do on St Patrick's Day, admittedly, but enough to make us dress our kids like ridiculous 18th century street urchins for the day and maybe raise a glass of Penderyn whisky or Magic Lagyr to the heavens.
While a large and growing number of scholars have begun to address questions of international influences on the United States Supreme Court, including its burgeoning enthusiasm for citing foreign practices and precedents in reaching decisions involving traditionally domestic areas of constitutional law (such as federalism, gay rights, affirmative action, and the death penalty--as opposed to international trade and admiralty cases), I will argue here that the focus on recent trends in this area as an issue of interpretive theory, a focus natural to most law professors, has obscured a whole range of "diplomatic" justifications for the practice that are discussed openly, and indeed, garrulously, by the Court's justices themselves.