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Search: Kiobel

19 Oct

and places where it could fault the Ninth Circuit’s steps to general jurisdiction, some broader than others. In an essay on Kiobel for the most recent Cato Supreme Court Review, I remarked that it might turn out the real work of the Chief Justice’s Kiobel opinion might be done, less by the presumption against extraterritoriality, than by the answer to final, dangling question: how much “corporate presence” is enough? In earlier days, ATS plaintiffs didn’t see themselves having to worry about questions contacts with the forum, jurisdiction over persons or...
19.10.13 | |

23 Apr

[Roger L. Phillips is an international criminal law practitioner. He also maintains Communis Hostis Omnium , a blog about maritime piracy. This post is cross-posted there.] The majority opinion in Kiobel precludes Alien Tort Statute claims for foreign conduct against foreign victims, leaving a small door for potential future claims that involve extraterritorial conduct so long as they touch and concern US territorial interests. But, when does a claim “touch and concern” the territory of the United States? Roger Alford notes that piracy may present an incident of “cross-border” conduct...
23.04.13 | |

28 Sep

Reading Roger’s post last week about how lower courts are interpreting the Supreme Court’s ATS ruling in Kiobel made me recall that I’ve fallen down in posting papers to SSRN – including a new one in the Cato Supreme Court Review 2012-2013, “The Alien Tort Statute’s Jurisidictional Universalism in Retreat.” The article (chatty and speculative, be warned, an essay aimed at a broader audience than ATS specialists or international law scholars) tries to set Kiobel and, for that matter, the ATS itself, in a wider frame of what jurisdiction is...
28.09.13 | |

18 Apr

[Chimène Keitner is Professor of Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law.] The Kiobel majority concludes that the plaintiffs in that case impermissibly sought to extend a U.S. cause of action to foreign conduct by foreign companies against foreign victims (even though the victims subsequently became lawful U.S. residents). It dismisses the historical practice of allowing suits for transitory torts (which I have explored in more detail here) by reasoning that the cause of action in ATS cases comes from U.S. law, not foreign or international law (the...
18.04.13 | |

17 Apr

of recent decades: Khobar Towers, Beirut barracks, USS Cole, Jerusalem bus bombings, African embassy bombings. All resulted in the application of domestic wrongful death tort laws based on the domicile of the decedent victim. There’s more I could say, but you get the idea. Transnational tort litigation cannot replace the old version of ATS litigation. But after Kiobel, human rights lawyers have precious few alternatives. If there is a silver lining to Kiobel, it is that human rights lawyers will wake up to what transnational tort litigation has to offer....
17.04.13 | |

21 Sep

be asserted, [while] international law would supply the substantive, conduct-regulating rules that apply to private actors” (p. 72). Kiobel misconstrues language in Sosa about whether private actors can violate international law to conclude that corporations cannot be held liable for certain conduct in U.S. courts. In terms of my proposed framework, Kiobel miscategorizes the question of whether corporations can be named as defendants as a conduct-regulating rule akin to aiding and abetting. This is wrong because aiding and abetting liability, unlike corporate liability, does not involve the attribution of the...
21.09.10 | |

08 May

are at the CCR site at https://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/al-shimari-v-caci-et-al and in particular the CCR brief on the ATS post-Kiobel issues at http://www.ccrjustice.org/files/399_2013-05.03%20Opposition%20ATS%20re%20Kiobel.pdf. The fervor around Kiobel now makes more sense in that what was at stake was corporate implication in the torture in the Bush Administration and limiting the extent of ATS as much as possible - this is not to minimize the cubed nature issue but to point out the abandonment of universal jurisdiction there as just a slightly veiled effort to tailor the jurisdiction to adjudicate to possibly avert reaching...
08.05.13 | |

28 Mar

2011, the civil war in Libya was still going on. Benjamin G. Davis Kiobel are US residents from what I can see, refugees from Nigeria from what I understand where the harm is said to have occurred. So now why is the Netherlands a better place where this is a multinational with offices all over the world operating through subsidiaries or directly also in the US and the plaintiffs have much less wherewithal ? Best, Ben Joshua Prof. Davis, I think the problem with noting how "Kiobel are US residents...
28.03.12 | |

23 Apr

[Beth Stephens is a Professor at Rutgers Law] As a late-arrival to this Insta-Symposium, I find that many of my thoughts about the Kiobel opinion have already been expressed. Corporate defendants won an important victory in Kiobel, at least for foreign corporations with no more than a “mere corporate presence” in the United States. I had not predicted that the justices would be unanimous in rejecting the ATS claims in this case. But in the most important aspect of the decision, I’m not surprised that we fell just one vote...
23.04.13 | |

24 Apr

[Austen Parrish is the Interim Dean and a Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.] With Kiobel, the general mood among those in the human rights community is pessimistic. Because it curtails use of the Alien Tort Statute, viewing the decision as a loss is tempting. From this perspective, Kiobel is another indication that the Court continues to reinvent itself with a particular brand of conservative activism, the U.S. remains hostile to international law and its institutions, and corporate interests have won out over the protection of...
24.04.13 | |

16 Jan

The American Journal of International Law has posted electronic excerpts from its “Agora: Reflections on Kiobel”, which will be published in its next issue. As a contributor to the AJIL Agora myself, I was fascinated to see the different takes that everyone had on the decision. For the most part, contributors seem to read Kiobel the same way: as sharply cutting back or even eliminating the vast majority of Alien Tort Statute claims that are based on overseas conduct. In general, the Agora seems to signify that the international legal...
16.01.14 | |

02 Oct

Kiobel petitioners’ approach overreaches wildly, but hides this fact by emphasizing various possible procedural limitations on ATS lawsuits (none of which they admit would apply to this case). At the core, the Kiobel petitioners are arguing that the ATS allows universal civil jurisdiction whether or not there is a nexus or connection to the United States. There is no support for this reading of the ATS in either the text or history of the ATS. At best, the Kiobel petitioners offer two arguments: 1) the ATS would have applied to...
02.10.12 | |