Search: Sosa

27 Apr Defending Harold Koh

...U.S. law (and here I include customary international law as part of U.S. law per the Paquette Habana and Sosa, albeit with lots of room to debate what the content of this law is). Similarly, we wanted to counter charges that the Supreme Court must ignore all foreign law, even if lawyers may debate which sources to employ and how much weight to attach to them. In doing so, we weren't suggesting that all Koh's critics are isolationist, but I do think that some of them follow that tradition. And,...

17 Apr Human Rights Will Survive Kiobel

...so entrenched (including in law, as documented in our textbook on the subject) that this erroneous and unfortunate US Supreme Court decision isn't as tragic as it would have been had it occurred, say, at the time of Sosa about a decade ago. The ATS has already inspired many different foreign analogues under which corporations can be sued for their actions abroad, and there's rightly much activity at present among legislatures further expanding this reality in many ways. Even today's decision, erroneous though it was (in my view) when one...

01 Sep Forum v Jurisdiction

Antoine Dear Kenneth, I recently wrote a note on jurisdiction and forum issues under ACTA. Hope this helps. http://lawnotepad.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/sosa/ Best, Antoine Antonin I. Pribetic Here is a basic, plain language summary: http://www.answers.com/topic/personal-jurisdiction (West's Encyclopedia of American Law via Answers.com) Kenneth Anderson Thanks! That's exactly what I'm looking for - plain, basic, and not too long....

25 Oct Second Circuit Relies on Rome Statute to Determine ATS Aiding-and-Abetting Liability

...of disagreement on that score. Beth Stephens has written on the comparative civil/criminal approaches to addressing human rights abuses in her article in the Yale Journal of International Law. 27 YJIL 1 (2002). I recently have written on the debate regarding corporate liability in this article in the Notre Dame Law Review. Post-Sosa, U.S. courts seem to be moving in the direction of corporate responsibility for aiding-and-abetting government human rights abuses. But even those that do hold corporations liable disagree on the correct standard to apply. I am not aware...

09 Mar U.S. Withdraws From ICJ Jurisdiction Over Consular Relations Claims

...of the Rome Statute followed closely Article 18 of the VCT - and was designed to avoid the consequences of being under an obligation to follow object and purpose of signed, but not ratified coventions under the same Article.In addition, the Supreme Court, in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, has now recognized customary international law as part of federal law. Unratified treaties are often regarded as an expression of customary law - often, that is, not in every instance. But that makes them even more meaningful, even within the US legal order....

05 Dec The CIA’s War On Terrorism – Another Source of ATS Lawsuits?

...The ACLU's complaint on behalf of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, whom the CIA rendered from Macedonia to Afghanistan for interrogation purposes, has just been filed. In addition to an unlikely Bivens claim asserting substantive and procedural due process violations, el-Masri asserts ATS claims for (a) torture/CID treatment and (b) prolonged arbitrary detention. Setting aside the almost inevitable attempt by DOJ to have the case dismissed on "state secrets" grounds, this approach (particularly the prolonged arbitrary detention argument) raises issues specifically left open by the Court in 2004's Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain....

10 Jul Does International Criminal Justice Deter Criminals?

...prison. So obviously if you're a genocidaire (and you're even thinking about what happens if you fall from power) you'd be happier to have an international tribunal around to turn yourself in to. This is a fortiori true of the ICC, whose default maximum punishment is 30 years in prison. And I bet the international tribunal prisons are a lot nicer than those in Rwanda, or Sudan, or Bosnia. I talk about the forum shopping possibilities created by international tribunals in Implementing Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain: What Piracy Reveals About the...

08 May Is the an International Human Right to Have an Abortion? Amnesty International Seems to Think So.

...of this blog no doubt know, customary international law is defined as “a general and consistent practice of states followed by them from a sense of legal obligation,” per the Restatement. 10) What constitutes an “obligation” imposed by customary international law should be accepted willy-nilly – certain acts clearly violate customary international law norms, like violation of “safe conducts,” infringements of the rights of ambassadors, and piracy on the high seas. (See the Supreme Court’s discussion in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 542 U.S. 692 (2004).) CIL does not, however, include a...