Politics & Power Quote by Sandra Day O'Connor

O'Connor is doing what she did best: making a potentially explosive idea sound like basic housekeeping. The line reads almost apologetic, but its intent is quietly radical in an American judicial culture that likes to imagine itself sealed off from outside influence. By choosing an unglamorous example - airline liability, damaged cargo, routine injuries - she strips the question of foreign precedent of its culture-war charge and relocates it in the realm of practical governance. Of course you look at what other signatories have done; otherwise a treaty becomes a set of matching signatures attached to wildly diverging obligations.

The subtext is a defense of judicial humility dressed up as common sense. Treaties are, by design, shared legal projects. Interpreting them in isolation is less "sovereignty" than solipsism, a way of converting an international promise into a domestic Rorschach test. O'Connor's phrasing ("occasionally", "perhaps") signals an awareness of the audience she's courting: lawyers and lawmakers wary of "foreign law" creeping into U.S. courts. She's not advocating a cosmopolitan free-for-all; she's drawing a boundary around a narrow category where comparative reasoning isn't optional, it's part of keeping the deal.

Context matters: O'Connor spoke in an era when conservative activists increasingly framed international norms as a threat to American constitutional identity. Her answer is pointedly institutional. She doesn't argue that other nations' courts are morally instructive; she argues they are relevant evidence of a treaty's meaning. It's a judge's pitch for legitimacy: consistency across borders as fidelity to the bargain, not betrayal of the flag.