A D.C. lawyer notes that today’s death penalty opinion in Roper v. Simmons is also an affront against federalism:

By invoking an imagined “trend” by state legislatures toward the statutory abolition of juvenile capital punishment, the Court effectively is allowing certain states to dictate policy in other states. States like Texas and Virginia now are bound by the policy preferences of legislators in Vermont and Oregon. It’s the perfect, if perverse, complement to the Court’s increasing invocation of foreign sources of “law,” as a result of which the American people as a whole are to be governed by elites in Brussels. . . . Roper thus represents not just an assault on judicial restraint, but an offense against federalism.