美最高法院限制《外国人侵权法》适用，终结企业人权诉讼

This is [music] Bloomberg Law with June Grao from Bloomberg Radio. This week, the Supreme Court handed down 10 decisions. Eight were by votes of six to three with the conservative Republican appointees in the majority and the liberal Democratic appointees in descent. This term, the court has already decided more cases split down ideological lines than it did in all of last term. On Tuesday, the court's conservatives put new limits on lawsuits alleging human rights violations against corporations over atrocities committed abroad, effectively putting an end to these suits over human rights abuses.

The reasoning echoed the concerns expressed by conservatives like justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaaugh during the oral arguments that Congress should be the branch dealing with accusations of human rights violations in other countries.

Really the job for creating causes of action because of foreign policy concerns as sympathetic as this ca particular case certainly is. But the responsibility for creating causes of action generally lies not with judges but with Congress.

I'm concerned at a separation of powers level that uh we're not really allowing suits to go forward, but Congress thinks we are because of a lack of clarity in our case law. The court granted tech giant Cisco's bid to shut down the lawsuit, alleging that the company worked closely with China to create the surveillance system that allowed officials to identify, apprehend, and torture members of the Fallon Gong spiritual movement in China.

Cisco has denied allegations of wrongdoing. My guest is an expert in international law, Curtis Bradley, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Kurt, tell us about this lawsuit by 12 Chinese nationals and one US citizen against Cisco.

So, the Cisco case was a suit brought by the Fallon Gong religious group from China, at least a number of members of that organization. They were suing not China in this case, but Cisco Systems, the computer company in the United States. And their argument was that Cisco had aided and emedded persecution of the fall & gong in China by supplying Chinese government with surveillance technology basically and the lower court had allowed this case to go forward and the Supreme Court said that it could not go forward and they issued a pretty important ruling about this type of human rights litigation which has been pretty active for the last 30 years and the court's decision in Cisco I think largely is going to put an end to these human rights cases. is brought against corporations.

So is the basic issue whether the alien tors statute creates liability for corporations who aid and abet human rights abuses?

Yeah, the case is based on this old statute called the alien tort statute. It's actually been on the books since the beginning of the country, 1789, but it has just been used for human rights litigation really during the last 30 or 40 years. And what the court held in the Cisco case was effectively it cannot be used for human rights claims is you know one way to translate the decision. They basically said the statute doesn't have enough indication in it that Congress has wanted these human rights cases to go forward.

So unless Congress amends the statute, the court is really putting an end to those cases. It did say that the statute could be used for a few personal injury type claims that would have been around in the 1780s, but they're not ones that we ever see today anymore. So this Cisco case basically says Congress will have to provide a new statute if plaintiffs are going to be able to sue for human rights abuses occurring in various countries.

And that's that's an important ruling because there have been many cases for human rights abuses brought for atrocities from around the world and they've been brought into US courts under this old alien tort statute and the Supreme Court had imposed a variety of restrictions on that litigation really in the last 15 years or so. But this is a more dramatic limit because [clears throat] it effectively just ends any more alien tort statute litigation, I think.

So the alien tor statute is only 33 words. I'm going to read it. The district court shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tor only committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States. So, if this is a court, you know, that's reading the statute and ruling according to the words, why doesn't that cover what's happening here?

Well, a couple of thoughts. One of the thing the court notes is that um until the 1980s, no one thought the statute provided a cause of action, a claim for human rights abuses. And the words that you just read are not really written in terms of a claim statute. All they say is that the courts have jurisdiction. that is that they're available to hear certain kinds of tort cases, but they don't really provide what we today would call a cause of action.

That is a right to seek damages or other relief. And at least in the modern era, courts wait until Congress provides an actual claim statute before it starts giving people the right to sue for damages. But in the alien tor statute cases, courts had been allowing suits for damages, even though I don't think the statute really addresses that. The other thing the court mentions is that suits for, you know, these tors around the world inherently raise foreign policy issues.

Sometimes they might promote some good in terms of human rights improvement, but they also sometimes create lots of conflicts with other countries. And the court thought that if Congress really wants that type of litigation, it needs to address those foreign policy issues more specifically. And just citing a statute from 1789 doesn't really show Congress has addressed all the foreign policy tradeoffs that human rights cases pose today.

And so effectively the court's just pushing this over to Congress.

The three liberals dissented from the part of the ruling that limited claims under the alien tort statute. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote an impassioned disscent saying the majority was throwing out two decades of settled precedent. quote, "The court's decision today is yet another notch in its belt, unabashedly remaking the law in its preferred image." I mean, only 20 years ago, the Supreme Court held the opposite of this decision.

There's a 2004 decision. It's called Sosa versus Albert MSE. And Sodomar's descent certainly understandably emphasizes that decision because the court there did allow at least some cases to continue proceeding under the alien tour statute. Now, it was a pretty limited holding in Sosa and the court said there should never be a particularly robust set of cases and it suggested a variety of limits that court should consider.

And since that 2004 decision, the Supreme Court has never found a case to satisfy those limits from that 2004 case. And so the majority in the Cisco case says we should just be clear that we're just not going to find a case that satisfies those strict limitations and just let everyone know so they don't waste time litigating because repeatedly the court has found reasons to reject those claims and now it's just doing so more categorically.

But I think the descent makes a reasonable point that the court's not really giving presidential effect to that 2004 case. My own view, by the way, you know, people disagree about this, is that the 2004 case was probably wrongly decided, and I think the majority believes that to be the case as well, but nevertheless, there's an argument that it was entitled to some presidential weight that the court is not giving it.

The Roberts court has been narrowing the alien tort statute over the years, and I remember the decision in 2021 where a suit accused Nestle and Cargle of aiding and abetting child slavery on the Ivory Coast. And the court ruled there was no cause of action there either. If there's no cause of action, then

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