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Search: Kiobel

19 Apr

If you haven’t been able to keep up with all of our posts on Wednesday’s Kiobel decision, An has a great round-up post here . Don’t forget that unsolicited submissions are still welcome for consideration. In other Kiobel news, ASIL has posted Curtis Bradley’s Insight here (.pdf). A judge in the Guatemalan case against former president Efrain Rios Montt has suspended his genocide trial on procedural grounds. Following briefings on the bleak humanitarian situation in Syria, the Security Council managed to find a consensus on a non-binding statement demanding an...
19.04.13 | |

18 Apr

In case you missed it, the US Supreme Court ruled on Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum affirming the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ dismissal. We have an insta-symposium (scroll down to related links to see all posts so far) going on with contributions from many prominent voices. As Roger noted yesterday, if you’d like to post on Kiobel, please contact us. SCOTUS Blog also has a nice roundup. A Pakistani court has ordered the arrest of former president Pervez Musharraf connected to allegations of treason in 2007. North Korea has...
18.04.13 | |

09 Jul

It’s likely old news to most OJ readers, but we should still note in passing that the DC Circuit, in a divided panel, handed down an important ATS case, John Doe VIII v Exxon Mobil Corp. It is noteworthy, among other things, for straight-out rejecting the Second Circuit’s Kiobel ruling, which held that there is no such thing as corporate liability in the ATS. The DC Circuit panel held otherwise. The circuit split is thus sharpened on an issue that was only glancingly mentioned, and not answered, in the Supreme...
09.07.11 | |

17 Apr

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 universally proscribable crime (see here for Donald Donovan and Anthea Roberts’ take on this). The Court seemed to take this idea pretty seriously in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain. At least, Justice...
17.04.13 | |

03 Dec

...and Peña-Irala were physically present in New York. The Doe case has not yet gone to a jury trial. Legal proceedings thus far have focused on whether the relevant laws apply to aiding and abetting international crimes, and whether the case can continue given recent US Supreme Court rulings. For example, a key 2013 ruling in the Kiobel case established that a presumption against extraterritoriality applies to ATS claims. In contemporary lawsuits, this doctrine implies that unless a law explicitly says that it applies outside US territory or Congress’ intent...
03.12.25 | , and |

19 May

...the courts – on the other hand, even if it does so, the inconsistency with the Bush administration may undermine the deference accorded the government. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia made exactly that point in the Kiobel oral argument (at 43-45) and the issue is discussed in more detail in my forthcoming article The Supreme Court and the Alien Tort Statute: Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. In any event, the article mentioned above, Pinochet’s Legacy Reassessed, 106 AJIL 731 (2012), analyzes a large number of cases often cited to...
19.05.13 | |

03 May

Columbia University historian Samuel Moyn has a tough post up on the Foreign Affairs website on Kiobel and the arc of the Alien Tort Statute, which he sees as having served the narrow constituency of us rather than being true to the historical origins of human rights: The ATS has been a boon for U.S. law schools, in which students rightly interested in saving the world have been taught to view the statute as an all-powerful tool. But the popularity of the law might have led them to neglect the...
03.05.13 | |

16 May

Armenian-American groups are up in arms over the U.S. government’s decision to file an amicus brief against a California law allowing claims against insurance companies by “Armenian genocide victims.” But they shouldn’t be. The law really involves an ongoing constitutional powers debate between the states and the federal government over foreign affairs, and the U.S. government is siding (not surprisingly) with its own powers. What is more interesting about this case, in the wake of Kiobel, is how human rights groups will increasingly support state autonomy in foreign affairs (to...
16.05.13 | |

14 Jul

...in favor of constraining judicial lawmaking powers unattractive. To be sure, he genuflects to a new argument proffered by plaintiffs, claiming that because the post-WWII tribunals acted to dissolve some Nazi-supporting companies, the Nuremberg and associated tribunals provides authority for holding corporations liable under customary international law. But that is not all that important to Posner’s argument, and he only devotes a single paragraph to that precedent. Why does Posner ultimately reject the Kiobel no-corporate liability argument? Although he is a bit unclear, I think his argument ultimately boils down...
14.07.11 | |

05 Dec

...respond. Finally, on Wednesday, Odette Murray, David Kinley, and Chip Pitts will discuss ‘Exaggerated Rumours of the Death of an Alien Tort? Corporations, Human Rights and the Remarkable Case of Kiobel‘. Of particular timeliness given recent developments, Murray, Kinley and Pitts analyse the legal and political ramifications of the Kiobel decision, and in their discussion update their article in light of the decision in Sarei v Rio Tinto and the recent grant of certiorari in the US Supreme Court. Justine Nolan of the University of New South Wales will respond....
05.12.11 | |

01 Feb

...and President Yanukovich’s crackdown on protesters; a recent TED Talk by Benjamin Bratton that got him thinking that we international lawyers can learn a lot from technologists (and vice versa); and China’s crackdown of Uighurs, by highlighting the case of Ilham Tohti. Duncan brought our attention to the unveiling of AJIL’s new blog: AJIL Unbound (a heartfelt welcome to the blogosphere!). We had four guest posts this week, two covering some of Roger’s posted thoughts on extraterritoriality in Kiobel and two on the effectivity of international criminal courts. In the...
01.02.14 | |

27 Oct

...that “moving from the abstractions of [human rights] instruments to operational rules is … automatic.” Nor do I suggest that “WTO dispute resolution [is] the first place [to] look when considering China’s evolution.” Rather I argue that trade law has the potential to help liberalize not just the movement of goods, but also information. He complains that I don’t cite Kiobel, by which he means the Second Circuit decision in that case (holding that corporations cannot be sued for human rights violations under the Alien Tort Statute), not the Supreme...
27.10.13 | |