Nestlé United States, Inc. v. Doe. 141 S. Ct. 1931.

On June 17, 2021, the United States Supreme Court reversed and remanded a suit filed against Nestlé USA and Cargill under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) for lack of jurisdiction. This case has already garnered attention over the nature of the dispute (child slaves in Africa), the Supreme Court's treatment of jurisdiction under the ATS, and the finding shared by five of the nine Supreme Court justices that domestic corporations can potentially be sued under the ATS. This analysis focuses on the child slavery and global supply chain aspects of the decision.

U.S. Supreme Court Holds Claims Against U.S. Corporations for Aiding and Abetting Child Slavery Impermissibly Extraterritorial, Declines to Resolve Domestic Corporate Liability

In Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe, et al., former child slaves who were trafficked into Côte d'Ivoire to work on cocoa farms filed suit under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) against U.S.-based companies that purchase cocoa from and provide other support to the farms, alleging that the companies aided and abetted child slavery. By an 8–1 vote, the Supreme Court held that the case involved an impermissible extraterritorial application of the ATS under the Court's precedent in Kiobel. The Court declined to resolve whether domestic corporations may be held liable under the ATS, although five justices across several opinions expressed the view that such corporations are not immune from ATS suits. The question of whether the Court should ever create new causes of action under the ATS prompted significant debate, with three justices suggesting that they would overrule Sosa v. Álvarez-Machain and a fourth indicating that there are strong arguments to reject judicial creation of any new ATS causes of action.

Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe (U.S. Sup. Ct.)

On June 17, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its opinion in Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe, a human rights case brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), alleging that U.S. companies aided and abetted child slavery in Ivory Coast. By a vote of 8 to 1, the Court held that the claims were impermissibly extraterritorial because nearly all the conduct occurred abroad. The Court left open the possibility that the implied cause of action under the ATS applies to U.S. corporations.

Pharmaceutical Companies, Human Rights, and the Alien Tort Statute

On January 3, 2019, U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang of the U.S. District Court of the District of Maryland took a crucial first step in redressing one of the worst human subjects research ethics violations in U.S. history.

7 International Human Rights Litigation

This chapter focuses on litigation under the Alien Tort Statute, which provides for jurisdiction over suits brought by aliens for torts in violation of international law. The chapter begins by exploring Congress’s likely intent in enacting the Statute in 1789, and how the Statute may have related to Article III of the Constitution (concerning the powers of the federal courts). The chapter then describes how the Statute received little attention until the Filartiga decision in 1980, which allowed for it to be used by aliens to sue other aliens for human rights abuses committed abroad. The chapter proceeds to explore a variety of doctrinal issues relating to this human rights litigation, including the source of the cause of action, the standards for bringing a claim, and the ability to sue corporations. The chapter also considers the contours of the Torture Victim Protection Act, which Congress enacted in 1992 to facilitate certain human rights claims. The chapter then discusses limitations on Alien Tort Statute litigation imposed by the Supreme Court in its 2004 decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, as well as the rise of suits brought against corporate defendants brought under the Statute. The chapter concludes by discussing the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, in which the Court substantially curtailed the territorial reach of claims that could be brought under the Statute, and the Court’s 2018 decision in Jesner v. Arab Bank, in which the Court disallowed suits under the Statute against foreign corporations.

Meandering Jurisprudence and Unanticipated Legacies

Assessments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s (ICTY) jurisprudential legacy tend to focus on the ICTY’s relationships with domestic criminal law. This chapter turns a new corner by examining the ICTY’s unexpected footprints in domestic civil litigation, specifically private tort claims brought in the US under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS, or Alien Tort Claims Act). Incorporation of international (including ICTY) materials in US ATS litigation remains a contested matter in which individual judges (both trial judges and appellate judges) demonstrate idiosyncratic behaviour. Some are ‘international law ignorers’, some are ‘international law enforcers’, some are ‘international law translators’, and some are ‘international law creators’. On this note, the ICTY’s legacy also touches upon broader questions of public international law and transnational legal migrations.

Lex Internationalis: Kiobel, Empires and the Color of Human Rights

In this article, I investigate the nature and origin of the Alien Tort Statute (A TS) and its link and application to the modern conception ofhuman rights. In the recent Kiobel decision, the Supreme Court resurrected the A TS and found that the A TS does not apply to human rights violations outside of the US allegedly committed by foreign-based corporations. The Supreme Court held that the presumption against extraterritorially applies to common law causes of action under the A TS, and no evidence exists that the First Congress wanted the A TS to confer jurisdiction over extraterritorial torts. In the article, Idevelop the notion ofthe color ofhuman rights to demonstrate that human rights itself has become a sort of lex internationalis.