Supreme Court Protects Corporations From Human-Rights Suits Under Alien Tort Statute
According to Bloomberg News:
The U.S. Supreme Court insulated multinational corporations from at least some lawsuits over atrocities abroad, scaling back a favorite legal tool of human rights activists.
The justices threw out a suit accusing two foreign-based units of Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) of facilitating torture and execution in Nigeria. The majority said the 1789 Alien Tort Statute generally doesn’t apply to conduct beyond U.S. borders.
In the Shell case, “all the relevant conduct took place outside the United States,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. The justices were unanimous on the outcome in the Shell case, while dividing in their reasoning.
The ruling may help a number of companies defeat similar lawsuits. Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), Chiquita Brands International Inc. (CQB), Siemens AG, Daimler AG and Rio Tinto Group (RIO) are all fighting Alien Tort Statute claims.
Without specifically addressing those cases, Roberts said a company couldn’t be sued under the Alien Tort Statute simply because it had a “corporate presence” in the U.S.
Roberts pointed to the “presumption against extraterritoriality,” saying that legal principle limits the reach of the Alien Tort Statute. The court’s four Democratic appointees -- Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- wrote separately to say they would have reached the same result using different reasoning.
Three other justices -- Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas -- said in separate opinions that the ruling was a narrow one. Kennedy said the court “is careful to leave open a number of significant questions.”
Human-rights advocates said before the Supreme Court decision that a ruling favoring Shell would undermine the ability of atrocity victims to hold their perpetrators accountable. Alleged victims have invoked the law more than 150 times in the past 20 years.
“A majority of our highest court has chosen to make it easier for big corporations complicit in human rights abuses to evade responsibility and vastly more difficult for their victims to get justice,” said Nan Aron, president of the Washington- based Alliance for Justice, in an e-mailed statement.
The suit before the high court was pressed by Nigerians who said two Shell units were complicit in torture and execution in the country’s Ogoni region from 1992 to 1995.
The justices heard arguments twice in the case, first in their 2010-11 term on contentions that the Alien Tort Statute doesn’t permit suits against corporations.
The court then expanded its review, ordering re-argument in October on a potentially more sweeping question: whether the statute applies beyond the U.S. borders.
The court’s decision to focus on that question means its ruling may apply to corporate officers as well as the companies.
The 33-word statute, enacted in 1789, was in part a reaction to an attack on a French diplomat in Philadelphia. The Alien Tort Statute then lay largely dormant for almost two centuries before being revived in the 1970s as a means of pressing human-rights lawsuits. . . .
In October 2012, the Federalist Society produced a post-argument SCOTUScast on the case. You can listen to it here.
According
On March 27, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Windsor v. U.S., the challenge to the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, and which bars the federal government from recognizing the validity of, or extending attendant benefits to, any marriage conferred by any of the states other than those consisting of only one man and one woman. The Court considered whether DOMA violates the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws as applied to persons of the same sex who are recognized to be married under the laws of their state, whether the Executive Branch’s assertion that DOMA is unconstitutional deprives the Court of jurisdiction to decide this case, whether the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the United States House of Representatives has standing in this case to defend DOMA. Carrie Severino of Judicial Crisis Network attended the oral arguments and then offered her analysis of the arguments, the merits, and the likely outcome of the case in a FedSoc podcast available
On March 26, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenge to the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, which amended the California constitution to define marriage as existing only between one man and one woman. The Court considered whether the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits California from defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman and whether petitioners have standing under Article III, § 2 of the Constitution in this case. Carrie Severino of Judicial Crisis Network attended the oral arguments and then offered her analysis of the arguments, the merits, and the likely outcome of the case in a podcast available
The Associated Press 
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