January 2014

Guest Post: Colangelo–Kiobel and Conflicts of Law

[Anthony Colangelo is Associate Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law.] As my comment to Roger’s initial post noted and my forthcoming piece in the Cornell Law Review explains, like Bill Dodge I view the presumption against extraterritoriality’s operation in Kiobel as going principally to the cause of action allowed by the ATS as opposed to the ATS proper. Though as Roger points out, the Supreme Court did find itself construing the ATS in order to discern whether the presumption applied to the cause of action, making an already messy area of law incoherent in light of the Court’s own most recent precedent, as I noted in an OJ Insta-Symposium contribution last spring. What I’d like to explore now is another question raised by this terrific series of posts: the extent to which state law incorporating international law may authorize suits for causes of action arising abroad after Kiobel. This question is both especially urgent because it involves a potential alternative avenue for litigating human rights abuses abroad in U.S. courts, and especially vexing because it juxtaposes different doctrinal and jurisprudential conceptualizations of the ability of forum law to reach inside foreign territory. On the one hand, the question can be framed as whether forum law applies extraterritorially; on the other, it can be framed as a choice of law among multiple laws, of which forum law is one. These different ways of framing the question are not necessarily mutually exclusive, yet they can lead to radically different results. Namely, Supreme Court jurisprudence stringently applying a presumption against extraterritoriality to knock out claims with foreign elements stands in stark contrast to a flexible cadre of state choice-of-law methodologies that liberally apply state law whenever the forum has any interest in the dispute. The result is a counterintuitive disparity: state law enjoys potentially greater extraterritorial reach than federal law. The disparity is counterintuitive because the federal government, not the states, is generally considered the primary actor in foreign affairs. Indeed, the presumption against extraterritoriality springs directly from foreign affairs concerns: its main purpose is to avoid unintended discord with other nations that might result from extraterritorial applications of U.S. law. If the federal government is the primary actor in foreign affairs, and if the presumption operates to limit the reach of federal law on a foreign affairs rationale, it follows that state law should have no more extraterritorial reach than federal law. Yet at the same time there is a long and robust history stretching back to the founding of state law providing relief in suits with foreign elements through choice-of-law analysis. Hence, not only does the disparity between the reach of federal and state law bring into conflict federal versus state capacities to apply law abroad (or entertain suits arising abroad), it also brings into conflict the broader fields that delineate those respective capacities: foreign affairs and federal supremacy on the one hand, which argue in favor of narrowing the reach of state law to U.S. territory, and private international law and conflict of laws on the other hand, which argue in favor of allowing suits with foreign elements to proceed in state court under state law.

Guest Post: Dodge–The Presumption Against Extraterritoriality Does Not Apply to Jurisdictional Statutes

[William S. Dodge is The Honorable Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. From August 2011 to July 2012, he served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked on the amicus briefs of the United States in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the State Department or of the United States.] The Supreme Court held in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 133 S. Ct. 1659 (2013), that the presumption against extraterritoriality applies to suits brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). In a recent post, Roger Alford asks whether a federal court sitting in diversity or a state court of general jurisdiction may still hear the federal common law claims for torts in violation of the law of nations that the Court recognized in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 542 U.S. 692 (2004). The answer depends on whether Kiobel applied the presumption against extraterritoriality to the ATS itself or to Sosa’s federal common law cause of action. As a general matter, the presumption against extraterritoriality does not apply to jurisdictional statutes. Putting Kiobel to one side for the moment, I know of only two cases in which the Supreme Court has used the presumption to interpret statutes that might be characterized as jurisdictional. In Argentine Republic v. Amerada Hess Shipping Corp., 488 U.S. 428, 440-41 (1989), the Court applied the presumption to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, and in Smith v. United States, 507 U.S. 197, 203-04 (1993), it applied the presumption to the Federal Tort Claims Act. But both the FSIA and the FTCA codify rules of immunity, which the Court has characterized as substantive, and so neither statute is purely jurisdictional. No one suggests that the presumption against extraterritoriality limits 28 U.S.C. § 1331 (the federal question statute), or 28 U.S.C. § 1332 (the diversity and alienage jurisdiction statute), or 18 U.S.C. § 3231 (the subject matter jurisdiction statute for federal criminal offenses). Yet none of these jurisdictional provisions contain the clear indication of extraterritoriality that would be necessary to rebut the presumption. To take one example, if the presumption against extraterritoriality were applied to 18 U.S.C. § 3231, a federal court would have to dismiss for lack of subject matter jurisdiction a federal prosecution for bombing U.S. government facilities abroad despite the fact that the substantive criminal statute (18 U.S.C. § 2332f) expressly applies when “the offense takes place outside the United States.” That makes no sense, and is not a result that any sensible court would reach. The Supreme Court’s decision in Morrison v. National Australia Bank, 130 S. Ct. 2869 (2010), confirms the distinction between substantive statutes to which the presumption against extraterritoriality applies and jurisdictional statutes to which it does not. In Morrison, the Court used the presumption to limit a substantive provision of the Securities Exchange Act, finding “no affirmative indication in the Exchange Act that § 10(b) applies extraterritorially.” Id. at 2883. But notably, the Court did not apply the presumption against extraterritoriality to the Exchange Act’s jurisdictional provision. To the contrary, the Court specifically held in Part II of its opinion that “[t]he District Court here had jurisdiction under 15 U.S.C. § 78aa to adjudicate the question whether § 10(b) applies to National’s conduct,” id. at 2877, despite the fact that § 78aa contains no clear indication of extraterritoriality, which would be needed to rebut the presumption if it applied. Kiobel is consistent with the distinction that courts applying the presumption against extraterritoriality have long drawn between jurisdictional and substantive statutes. “We typically apply the presumption to discern whether an Act of Congress regulating conduct applies abroad,” the Court noted. 133 S. Ct. at 1664 (emphasis added). The ATS was not such a statute; the Sosa Court had held that it was “strictly jurisdictional.” But Sosa also held that the ATS authorized courts to recognize federal common law causes of action for torts in violation of the law of nations, and it was to those causes of action that the Supreme Court applied the presumption in Kiobel. “[W]e think the principles underlying the canon of interpretation similarly constrain courts considering causes of action that may be brought under the ATS.” Id. (emphasis added). Thus, after reviewing the text and history of the ATS, the Court concluded “that the presumption against extraterritoriality applies to claims under the ATS, and that nothing in the statute rebuts that presumption.” Id. at 1669 (emphasis added). To be clear,