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Search: Sosa

09 Apr

...applied to nonresident enemy aliens, the plaintiffs cannot avail themselves of that amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment because they were never convicted of a crime, whether a war crime or otherwise.” Second, the Court ruled that under Sosa, the Alien Tort Statute is only a jurisdictional statute and as such, any ATS claim against a federal employee must satisfy the requirements of the Westfall Act. (The Westfall Act affords federal employees absolute immunity from tort liability for negligent or wrongful acts or omissions they commit while acting within...
09.04.07 | |

15 Jun

...action and fashioning federal common law. The text of the ATS, a jurisdictional statute, does not answer that question. Courts, however, should be guided at least in general terms by the legislative purpose to permit a tort remedy in federal court for law-of-nations violations for which the aggrieved foreign nation could hold the United States accountable, which is an important touchstone for determining whether U.S. courts should be deemed responsible for affording a remedy under U.S. law. See Sosa, 542 U.S. at 714-718, 722-724 & n.15. The brief goes out...
15.06.12 | |

01 Oct

...(page 10), and about the scope of the presumption against extraterritoriality (p. 37). Several Justices, including Chief Justice Roberts, asked about the possibility of vindicating one’s rights in another forum that has a closer connection to the events or the parties, including the defendant’s domiciliary forum (the United Kingdom or the Netherlands) or the place of injury (Nigeria). None of the swing Justices seemed interested in the concept of universal jurisdiction, except to preserve the Sosa paradigm that embraced piracy on the high seas as an actionable international law violation....
01.10.12 | |

27 Sep

The comments thus far have been quite interesting and I am very pleased that David Moore and Beth Stephens are participating in this online workshop with us on the forthcoming article by Curtis Bradley, Jack Goldsmith, and David. For the sake of space, I will not discuss my points of agreement with the article and will simply pose a question. My main contribution to the discussion is to emphasize the distinction between the authors’ view of the majority opinion in Sosa with the concurring view by Justice Scalia (joined by...
27.09.06 | |

04 Jun

...employment prong under the non-commercial tort exception? Some lower court case law suggests that state law, not federal law, informs the question. Other case law looks to the law of the sovereign itself. Consequently, we end up in a situation where different sources of law inform the same inquiry, an unfortunate result. 3. What’s the authority for the federal common law? Most of you are familiar with the very good Seventh Circuit cases arising out of the Enahoro litigation that discuss this question. After Erie and maybe Sosa too, one...
04.06.10 | |

28 Sep

...through the Sosa-required framing language of genocide, crimes against humanity, slavery, forced labor, etc.) looks less like ‘hostis humani generis’ and a lot more like an attempt to take serious, and yet by comparison to genocide, “ordinary” issues of environmental, labor, public health, etc., harms and curb them through an otherwise nonexistent (in international law today) regime of international civil tort liability resident in US courts. Curbing such harms is a good goal – we do need a lot more regulation of the conditions of the global supply chain –...
28.09.13 | |

03 May

...by other state actors that the hegemon acts in some legitimate way according to a broader set of interests, including theirs. It is power transformed by legitimacy into authority. In a period of rising US hegemony – approximately, and not coincidentally, the period that coincides with the cementing of human rights as the “apex” value of the international system, the 1990s – the ATS is able to expand. Sosa’s language sometimes reflects that; in some ways, Sosa seems to anticipate a world in which American hegemony will underwrite universal human...
03.05.13 | |

07 May

...the definition of piracy adopted by the Ninth Circuit cannot meet the Supreme Court’s “Sosa” standard for requiring ATS claims to be “universal” and “specific” under international law. I think there is some force to this argument, although I find their disparagement of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea’s definition of piracy a little odd. In any event, the question may turn on the definition of “private ends” that UNCLOS requires as an element of piracy. I don’t have a strong view on this, but I refer...
07.05.15 | |

04 Dec

...policies. See Baker, 369 U.S. at 217. And here’s what Holder’s brief had to say about corporate liability for aiding and abetting: Plaintiffs’ core contention is that Chiquita aided and abetted the murders committed by the paramilitaries because it paid money to them. (See Compl. ¶¶ 219, 224.) In so contending, plaintiffs rely on a theory of secondary liability whose continued viability following Sosa has been the subject of intense controversy among the courts and which has been strongly opposed by the United States Government. While neither the Supreme Court...
04.12.08 | |

08 Oct

...mistaken). Plaintiffs in this case seek to hold corporate defendants liable under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), 28 U.S.C. §1350, for aiding and abetting international law violations respecting forced labor and child labor by unidentified farmers in the Ivory Coast. We believe the District Court was correct in dismissing these claims. First, Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 542 U.S. 692 (2004), directs that only violations of well-established, specifically defined, and universally agreed-upon international law rules may be recognized under the ATS. In this case, the international legal consensus required by Sosa is...
08.10.11 | |

14 Aug

...statute. In Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, the Supreme Court considered the phrase “law of nations” in the quite different context of the Alien Tort Statute. If we were to adopt that approach, the courts could only adopt definitions of piracy that are as well settled under the law of nations today as they were at the time the piracy statute was enacted. I bet the lower and appellate courts that consider this question will follow the Sosa approach. Which probably (although not necessarily) means the pirates here are out of luck....
14.08.10 | |

03 Jun

Observer The description of the Sosa decision in this article really irked me: Liptak says the Court "limited claims to classic violations of international norms like piracy, torture and slavery." I know this is a newspaper and not a law review article, but this overly narrow description makes the trial lawyers seem even more opportunistic and unconcerned with governing law than is needed. Adam Liptak I'd welcome an alternative to my formulation concerning the substantive limitations imposed by Sosa. That said, whatever its shortcomings, I don't follow why my formulation...
03.06.07 | |