[Anthony J. Colangelo is Associate Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law.] I’ll start with a few brief points about why I believe Justice Breyer’s opinion provides a sounder approach and is more legally accurate than the Court’s opinion. Then I will critique the Court’s opinion and, in particular, its extension of a presumption against extraterritoriality to causes of action...
[Thomas H. Lee is the Leitner Family Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2012-13.] Based on my quick read through the opinions, it seems that it’s a win for corporations and a loss for international human rights groups seeking to use the US federal district courts to vindicate claims of...
One idea that Kiobel has put to rest (at least here in US courts) is the idea that the ATS could be fairly read as a grant of universal civil jurisdiction. On this theory, the ATS could be applied to overseas activities if the nature of the alleged action was so heinous as to rise to the level of a...
This is a tough loss for the human rights advocacy community, ending an era that began with the Second Circuit's rediscovery of the Alien Tort Statute in its 1980 decision in Filartiga v. Pena. As Julian highlights below, Justice Kennedy may have left the door ajar to future claims, but only barely. Even Breyer's concurrence -- the rejection of the...
Would've been helpful if he'd said a wee bit more. For now, we'll have to comb through the majority opinion in search of the questions he has in mind. In the meantime, worth noting the Court was 9-0 in affirming the Second Circuit's decision to dismiss the ATS complaint in this case. JUSTICE KENNEDY, concurring. The opinion for the Court is careful...
Yesterday, the ICJ reached its judgment in the frontier dispute between Burkina Faso and Niger. The BBC has more here. According to a bipartisan report by the Constitution Project (.pdf), the US has engaged in torture at the highest levels. Human Rights Watch also offers a statement here. The New Zealand parliament has passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. Privacy International has sued the United...
Oral arguments began yesterday at the ICJ in the Thailand-Cambodia border dispute about land surrounding the Temple Vihear, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Syrian warplanes have launched further attacks in Damascus in addition to a handful of other rebel-held Syrian cities. Heads of the World Health Organization and UNICEF made a rare political plea to the international community yesterday stating that intervention...
As North Korea celebrated the 101st birthday of the country's founder, the US has said it is ready to "reach out" if Pyongyang gives up its nuclear aspirations after warning North Korea that a nuclear missile launch would be a "huge mistake." Foreign Policy offers a way to solve the North Korea nuke problem, opining that the road to Pyongyang goes...
This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a symposium on the latest issues of the Leiden Journal of International Law, introduced here by Dov Jacobs. The first article, On the Functions of International Courts: An Appraisal in Light of Their Burgeoning Public Authority by Armin von Bogdandy and Ingo Venzke, discussed the functions of international courts in the international legal order beyond their traditional dispute settlement...
The US says with "moderate confidence" that North Korea does in fact have a nuclear weapon that they would be capable of mounting to a ballistic missile, but that such a weapon would likely be unreliable. At the G8 summit in London, leaders were "appalled" by the violence and number of casualties in Syria and urged humanitarian assistance from all countries. During...
Today (April 12) St. John's Law School of Law is hosting a conference in New York in cooperation with NATO's Allied Command Transformation group entitled Cyberconflict: Threats, Responses and the Rule of Law. The conference brings together experts from the armed forces, academia, and law enforcement to consider issues at the intersection of technology, law enforcement, national security, civil liberties...
Pierre N. Leval, a well-respected judge who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, has published a full-scale no-holds-barred policy defense of the Alien Tort Statute in Foreign Affairs. The essay, which is adapted from his lecture to the New York City Bar Association, offers the standard argument in favor of the...
