Mark S., I addressed Justice Ginsburg’s badly confused views on the use of foreign and international legal materials a few years ago in this NRO essay, “Alien Justice: Ruth Bader Ginsburg vs. the Declaration of Independence.” Here are some excerpts:

The title of [Ginsburg’s] speech — “‘A decent Respect to the Opinions of [Human]kind’: the Value of a Comparative Perspective in Constitutional Adjudication” — nicely encapsulates the core flaws in her position.
First is her thinly disguised contempt for the Framers. Obtusely appealing to the Declaration of Independence to justify the Supreme Court’s dependence on foreign law, Ginsburg cannot resist the urge to purge the gender bias she perceives in the Framers’ observation that “a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind” requires a declaration of the “causes which impel them to the Separation.” Nor, apparently, did she notice that one of those stated causes was that King George III “has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution.” …
The second basic flaw in Ginsburg’s speech is signaled by her elusive subtitle. What exactly does a “comparative perspective” in constitutional adjudication mean, and what is its value? Addressing a group of international lawyers, Ginsburg resorts to kindergarten talk — “we can learn from others,” “we can join hands with others,” we should “share our experience” — but never even attempts to explain how a foreign court’s decision on how a foreign law measures up to a foreign charter can or should have analytical value in construing our Constitution. She emphasizes that she does not regard foreign decisions as “controlling authorities.” Could those foreign decisions be the tipping factor in a particular case? Ginsburg doesn’t expressly say so, but she gives no reason why that couldn’t happen. Nor does she offer any principle to determine what weight they should have. In short, she has no response to Scalia’s criticism: “To invoke alien law when it agrees with one’s own thinking, and ignore it otherwise, is not reasoned decisionmaking, but sophistry.”

It will perhaps not be surprising that State Department nominee Harold Koh and various of his supporters make the same ludicrous misuse of the Declaration of Independence in support of their transnationalism.