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It has long been fashionable to criticize the U.S. for being out of step with more progressive nations--like continuing to execute murderers, for instance, despite complaints from more evolved European countries.  Several Supreme Court justices have been making more than a perfunctory nod towards foreign law in deciding American cases.  If, oh, Albania looks at an issue a particular way, so should we, they seem to believe.

The Obama administration is likely to push this process along.  Exhibit A of its thinking is the recent nomination of Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as the State Department legal advisor.  Koh's a bright guy, but has been putting his intelligence to work for a dubious cause.  Writes John Fonte in National Review's The Corner:

The Transnational Progressive assault on the sovereignty of the American liberal democratic nation-state has just kicked into high gear with the nomination by the Obama administration of Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh to be the Legal Advisor to the U.S. State Department. Dean Koh wants to "trigger a transnational legal process" that will "generate legal interpretations that in turn can be internalized into domestic law." Put simply, he favors opening a transnational legal space beyond the Constitution and the democratic decision-making process of our liberal democracy.

It's one thing for the American people to knowingly and voluntarily agree to join an international compact and apply international standards.  It is quite another for them to find their laws and practices transformed without their consent by choices made beyond their own borders and Constitution by peoples with very different philosophies and theologies.