International Law, As Established At Nuremberg*: The ACTUAL Grounds On Which the Supreme Court Will Rule For Shell Oil’s Parent Company In Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum

In her post earlier today on Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, the sort-of-CitizensUnited-like case argued yesterday in the Supreme Court, Linda discusses the issue that was supposed to be the one that the Court would decide, because, well, that was the issue that the lower appellate court, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, decided.  The issue is whether under the Alien Tort Statute, which was enacted in 1789 and allows “aliens” to file civil lawsuits in the U.S. for violations of the “law of nations,” allows aliens to sue corporations, or instead only individuals, for violations of human rights as defined under clearly-established international law.

The Second Circuit court said it doesn’t, and, as the excerpt from that opinion that Linda posts shows, the appellate panel used as its justification the judges’ own moral judgment that since individuals (i.e., the corporation’s top executives) make the corporate decisions to leverage the corporation’s resources to accomplish these heinous acts, only those individuals, and not the ill-used corporation itself, should be suable.  And that therefore, only those individuals, and not the ill-used corporation itself, will be suable in U. S. federal courts under the ATS.

This notwithstanding that the statute itself says nothing at all about whocan be sued under it; it states only what acts the actor can be sued for.  And notwithstanding that the Second Circuit panel’s stated grounds for the ruling, if not necessarily the result (the dismissal of the lawsuit), conflict with the Supreme Court’s ruling two years ago in Citizens United v. FEC.  Which parlayed the First Amendment free-speech right of individuals into a right of corporate CEOs to leverage those rights of its individual human shareholders into a First Amendment speech right of the CEO to use corporate funds to advance his or her political preferences.

The plaintiffs in the case, 12 Nigerians, allege that Shell Oil aided and abetted the Nigerian government in committing horific violations of human rights against protesters of the company’s operations in that country in the 1990s.  According to the several reports I’ve read about yesterday’s argument, Anthony Kennedy, author of the Citizens United opinion, said at the very outset that he agreed with Shell’s statement in its brief that international law does not recognize corporate liability. Case closed.
But Elena Kagan (not a personal favorite of mine, for reasons that I’ll leave for another post, but someone who does demonstrate the ability to recognize distinctions in procedural/jurisdictional law in response to Kennedy’s indications that he cannot, and who is not shy about showing it; this is the second time in about a year that Kagan has done that during an oral argument) pointed out that international law addresses the acts that violate universally accepted human rights, but is silent on who can be sued for committing those acts.

And Samuel Alito and Stephen Breyer agreed. “Let’s assume that the French ambassador is assaulted or attacked in some way in the United States, and that that attack is by a 10 corporate agents. Would we say that the corporation cannot be sued under the Alien Tort Statute?” Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick quotes Alito as asking Kathleen Sullivan, Shell’s lawyer.  Who responded, “Yes, because there is no assaulting ambassador norm that applies to corporations.” Oh?  Does the State Department’s Foreign Service know this?  

Lithwick also quotes Sullivan as saying that “Nuremberg, if it established nothing else, established that it is individuals who are liable for human rights offenses.” She must be right that that’s what the Nuremberg trials established, since the Nuremberg prosecutors didn’t indict Volkswagen and try to have it executed. 

Breyer suggested that pirates should incorporate themselves, under the name “Pirates, Inc.”  A company in which I want to buy stock, if it ever goes public. Under international securities law.  As established at Nuremberg.

Nuremberg, by the way, didn’t establish “nothing else.”

Lithwick suggests that a majority of the justices will not say that corporations cannot be sued under the ATS.  Given the 5-4 ruling in Citizens United, the juxtaposition of the two opinions would be too damaging to the Court’s standing among the public.  I agree; after all, the First Amendment doesn’t say that corporations have First Amendment speech rights, nor mention corporations at all, but that didn’t stop the majority of justices from …  well ….

But neither do I think the Court will say that the ATS does allow lawsuits against corporations for violations of internationally recognized human rights. I think a majority will decide not to decide that issue at all, in this case.  Instead, a majority will say what Alito said at another point: that the statute was not intended to allow people who have no connection to the United States to sue under the statute for violations of human rights by anyone—human or corporate—that himself/itself has no legal-status connection to the United States and that occurred outside the United States.  The Nuremberg defense will have to await another day to succeed or not.

Alito’s French-ambassador-assaulted-in-the-U.S. hypothetical was not a random fact selection. The purpose of the statute, it was made clear during the argument, was to grant ambassadors to the U.S. the right to sue in U.S. court for violations of human rights committed in the U.S—rights they have long had here anyway.  But this is a very old statute, and apparently predates those rights.  The statute itself doesn’t say that it’s limited to circumstances involving victims or perpetrators who have with legal ties to the U.S.  But, whatever.  

I expect that the Court will fill in those blanks.  Although I won’t bet on it. I’ll save my money instead for the Pirates, Inc. IPO.

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*Just to be clear: The first part of the title—the part before the colon—is intended as sarcasm.  It’s a takeoff on Kathleen Sullivan’s weird claim about the meaning of the Nuremberg trials.