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The Alien Tort Claims Act is virtually unique in U.S. legislation for its clear recognition of international human rights. This unparalleled collection of essays, the only extensive work on the Act, draws together the best analyses and interpretations written to date, under the editorship of two of America's most untraditional and imaginative theorists of international law, and makes a formidable case for the Alien Tort Claims Act as a powerful tool for all lawyers, regardless of specialization. The book includes an exhaustive annotated bibliography. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint

Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. marks the second time in nine years that the Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) does not provide jurisdiction in a high-profile human rights case, a sequence that might suggest an end to the gilded age of human rights litigation that began with Filártiga v. Peña-Irala. On closer analysis, however, Kiobel, like Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain before it, adopts a rhetoric of caution without foreclosing litigation that fits the Filártiga model. To the contrary, Sosa and Kiobel invite considerably more ATS litigation than they resolve or bar and therefore confirm Justice Antonin Scalia's memorable encapsulation of the Court's "Never Say Never Jurisprudence." All four of the opinions in Kiobel confirm that multiple significant issues remain for future resolution, but it is unrealistic to expect answers on the basis of the Court's decision because what is law in Kiobel isnt clear and what is clear in Kiobel isn't law.

In offering a form of civil redress to the victims of international human rights violations, litigation under the Alien Tort Statute ("ATS") has come to reflect in microcosm the ways that international law and practice have changed in the last half century. Specifically, the successful ATS cases since the Second Circuit's seminal decision in Fildrtiga v. Peia-Irala illustrate the blurring of certain structural distinctions that had long given international law its characteristic shape, especially the distinctions between public and private international law, between treaties and custom, between state and nonstate actors, between international and domestic law, and between lex lata and lex ferenda. But in the aftermath of the epochal attacks of September 11, 2001, the modest progress made by international human rights litigators in Fildrtiga and its progeny has been threatened by the same forces that undermine the recognition of domestic civil rights, particularly through the executive branch's broad claims to law-free zones of power. The broadest critiques of the ATS have been that the private litigation of human rights violations complicates the war on terrorism, that it amounts to "plaintiffs' diplomacy" by interfering with executive branch prerogatives in foreign affairs, and that it threatens to impose a uniquely American form of liability on multinational corporations for their alleged complicity in human rights violations by the governments with which they do business. The narrower critique has centered on the more technical assertion that the ATS is purely jurisdictional and provides no private right of action; in other words, Congress must adopt additional legislation implementing an international human rights norm before it can be litigated under Section 1350. The ATS has also provided fresh context for decades-old battles over the constitutional status of international law, the scope of the self-executing treaty doctrine, and the problem of proving the content of customary international law.

The experience under the Potsdam Accord accounts for the surprising obscurity into which that agreement has fallen in the American conscience. That is, the consequences of the Accord generated a body of modern law that has displaced the legislative effects of the agreement itself. Thus, the Accord as implemented offered an object lesson in the consequences of an ineffective human rights regime & thereby contributed to the emergence of the principles that the collective, discriminatory, & permanent expulsion of populations in the aftermath of war is illegal. Similarly, the justification for the Potsdam Accord, as a form of lawful punishment imposed upon a criminal regime for its breaches of fundamental norms of international law, ultimately proved insufficient & thus triggered a critical counter-reaction in the law of State Responsibility. Finally, the experience under the Accord -- especially the sustained controversy over its meaning & implementation -- demonstrated that the international community needs clarity in its legal mechanisms for concluding armed conflict, a desideratum that eludes us still. Adapted from the source document.

"Die Erfahrungen mit dem Potsdamer Abkommen erklären vielleicht die erstaunliche Tatsache, daß dieses aus dem Bewußtsein der Amerikaner fast völlig entschwunden ist. Der Grund mag sein, daß die Folgen des Abkommens ein Geflecht von modernen Regelungen gezeitigt haben, hinter dem die Rechtsetzung des eigentlichen Abkommens seine Auswirkungen eingebüßt hat. Das heißt: Die Art und Weise, wie das Abkommen verwirklicht worden ist, hat deutlich gemacht, welche Folgen ein ineffizientes Menschenrechts-Regime haben kann, und dies hat wiederum dazu beigetragen, daß Völkerrechtsregeln entstanden sind, aufgrund derer die kollektive, diskriminierende und endgültige Vertreibung von Bevölkerungen in der Folge eines Krieges als rechtswidrig eingestuft werden kann. Man kann auch sagen: Die Rechtfertigung des Potsdamer Abkommens, es sei ein Beispiel gerechter Bestrafung eines verbrecherischen Regimes für seine Verstöße gegen fundamentale Regeln des Völkerrechts gewesen, hat sich schließlich als unhaltbar erwiesen und zu einer kritischen Gegenbewegung bei der Entwicklung des Rechts der Verantwortlichkeit von Staaten geführt. Schließlich ist zu sagen, daß die Erfahrungen mit dem Potsdamer Abkommen - vor allem die langanhaltenden Auseinandersetzungen über seine Bedeutung und Verwirklichung - deutlich gemacht haben, daß die internationale Gemeinschaft für ihr rechtliches Vorgehen bei der Beendigung von bewaffneten Konflikten eine klare Grundlage braucht - und auf diese warten wir noch immer." (Autorenreferat)

From the beginning of our constitutional life, the Supreme Court has articulated principles that structure the juridical relationship between international law and domestic law. These principles purportedly offer rules of decision for resolving in domestic courts the potential in-consistencies between external and internal sources of law, and they do so with the surface simplicity of axioms. Treaties, for example, cannot trump constitutional norms.' Customary international law can provide a rule of decision at least in the absence of controlling legislative or executive acts. In the case of an irreconcilable conflict between a treaty and a statute, the latter-in-time prevails. When Congress incorporates conventional or customary norms into a statute, those norms become directly enforceable and in the absence of any other applicable principle, United States statutes should be read "where fairly possible" so as not to violate international law. These principles have been criticized variously as innocuous, anomalous, and asymmetrical.' But they also reflect the Court's insistence hat domestic and international law be accommodated, not necessarily as equals, but as two legitimate sources of norms binding on the United States and enforceable in its courts. Doctrinal purity may have been sacrificed, but the Court's accommodationist imperative has had the advantage of avoiding both dualist and monist extremes. As a result of the Supreme Court's approach, the debate persists about the proper way to characterize the relationship between international and domestic law in the United States.