Well, think again. NAFTA tribunals can review decision of the Supreme Court, and the highest courts of the fifty states, under NAFTA's chapter 11.
"This is the biggest threat to United States judicial independence that no one has heard of and even fewer people understand," said John D. Echeverria, a law professor at Georgetown University."
"The availability of this additional layer of review, above even the United States Supreme Court, is a significant development, legal scholars said.
"It's basically been under the radar screen," Peter Spiro, a law professor at Hofstra University, said. "But it points to a fundamental reorientation of our constitutional system. You have an international tribunal essentially reviewing American court judgments."
The part of Nafta that created the tribunals, known as Chapter 11, received no consideration when it was passed in 1993.
"When we debated Nafta," Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said in 2002, "not a single word was uttered in discussing Chapter 11. Why? Because we didn't know how this provision would play out. No one really knew just how high the stakes would get."
Senator Kerry spoke before the tribunal rulings concerning the Massachusetts and Mississippi judgments. He offered his comments in connection with legislation he had offered to limit the jurisdiction of the tribunals. His amendment was rejected by the Senate."
Abner Mikva, a former chief judge of the federal appeals court in Washington and a former congressman, is one of the three Nafta judges considering the Mississippi case. He declined to discuss it but did offer his perspective on Chapter 11.
"If Congress had known that there was anything like this in Nafta," he said, "they would never have voted for it.""
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/politics/18COUR.html?hp