[Beth Stephens is Professor of Law at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey-Camden.] Monday’s oral argument in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Inc. focused on the search for a coherent limit to the reach of the Alien Tort Statute. The need for some limit is uncontroversial: even the most ardent advocates of human rights accountability agree that not all cases...
[Chimène I. Keitner, is a Visiting Professor of Law at the USC Gould School of Law and Professor of Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law.] Personal jurisdiction ain’t what it used to be. As Justice Ginsburg noted (Tr. at 54), in the age of Goodyear Tire, multinational corporations can’t necessarily be sued everywhere for everything. But Shell’s message...
[William S. Dodge is 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...
[Curtis Bradley is the William Van Alstyne Professor of Law at Duke University.] The Alien Tort Statute (ATS) is one-sentence long, was enacted more than 200 years ago, has essentially no drafting history, and was relatively unknown before the Second Circuit’s seminal Filartiga decision in 1980. As a result, although it is obvious that the ATS was meant to provide the...
I am still digesting the transcript of the Kiobel reargument today, although I can say that nothing in the argument today has changed my view that this brief (which both Ken and I signed) represents the best approach to resolving the case. I will say, however, that nothing in the argument suggested that any member of the Court is considering...
My initial impression of the Kiobel oral argument is that the Supreme Court is going to do its best to do an historical analysis of the ATS and use that history to find ways to limit its scope. It could do so by holding that the ATS does not apply extraterritorially, or that it does not apply unless there is...
Last week, while I was participating in a conference, I received an email from Google with a puzzling subject line: "Subpoena Notice from Google (Internal Ref. No. 257121)." I opened the email, assuming that it was some kind of sophisticated phishing attempt. It wasn't. It was Google informing me -- more than a little cryptically -- that Chevron had subpoenaed...
Since June 2012, there has been a new addition to the international legal blogosphere: Armed Groups and International Law. The blog is edited by Katharine Fortin of Utrecht University and Rogier Bartels at the Netherlands Defence Academy and the University of Amsterdam. The blog's two main purposes are information sharing and community building between individuals and organizations working on issues related to armed groups....
Benjamin Netanyahu is being suitably mocked for the Wily E. Coyote-like picture of a bomb he used at the UN to describe Israel's "red line" concerning Iran's purported efforts to build a nuclear weapon. There's no need for me to pile on; even right-wingers are horrified, with Jeffrey Goldberg -- Jeffrey Goldberg! -- tweeting earlier today that "Netanyahu's bomb cartoon...
[Polina Levina is a masters in international law candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Kaveri Vaid is an Institute for International Law and Justice Scholar at New York University School of Law.] Overview Recently, Human Rights Watch released a report detailing systematic practices of capture, torture, and rendition of members of the Libyan opposition by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. At least...
Two posts today by ostensibly progressive bloggers claim that MEK has not been involved in a terrorist attack in years. Joshua Keating at FP: The idea that a group blamed for the killing of six Americans in the 1970s, as well as dozens of deadly terrorist bombings against Iranian targets afte,r that is “the largest peaceful, secular, pro-democratic Iranian dissident group”...
