North America

Kiobel and the Resurgence of the Traditional Bases of Jurisdiction in the Alien Tort Statute

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 supposed to mean beyond its technicalities.  It contrasts the sweeping universalist language of 1980s-era ATS suits, and the belief of people like Judge Irving Kaufman (who wrote the celebrated Filartiga opinion) that they were pronouncing on "international law " through the exercise of universal jurisdiction, even though it happened to be in a US district court and applying distinctly US concepts through and through, with Kiobel's return to traditional jurisdictional categories. Whether the Chief Justice's application of the presumption against extraterritoriality or Justice Breyer's more capacious, yet still traditionally grounded, tests for jurisdiction, Kiobel signaled that the traditional grounds found, for example, in the Restatement of Foreign Relations are the ones that matter.  One could say, of course, that this has been true for a while.  After all, arguing that the ATS might require some conduct by someone that constitutes a violation of the law of nations, but doesn't take into account whether the law of nations recognizes that someone as having the legal capacity to violate the law of nations, and so merely a domestic statute providing a domestic civil remedy for something that need not be international law as such, but merely conduct that would, if done by some actor with legal capacity, violate international law - well, that isn't making any sweeping assertions about being international law or universal jurisdiction for the application of international law.  It's just a peculiar American statute that gate-keeps liability with a weirdly counterfactual reference to international law as it might be. International law in the subjunctive mood, maybe we could say.  But in that case, treating the statute as merely a domestic one with a weirdly constructed trigger, invoking a "law of nations" that we don't mean the way other people mean it, argues strongly for a traditional approach to jurisdiction - it's not universal jurisdiction anymore, because we're not pretending that our reference point is actually universal, but instead merely a claim of extraterritoriality.  So it doesn't seem quite so strange that the Chief Justice would invoke the presumption against extraterritoriality, because the thing, the statute, that plaintiffs propose to apply extraterritorially isn't truly a claim of universality, either.