Circuit Split on Corporate Liability in Alien Tort Statute Cases?

Over at Opinio Juris, the international law professor blog, my colleague Roger Alford (Pepperdine) has a great new post up on amicus briefs being filed by various prominent law professors on the question of corporate liability in Alien Tort Statute cases. Part of the debate is whether there is now a circuit split on fundamental questions of corporate liability in international law, and whether that urges a hearing by the Supreme Court, which did not exactly settle ATS standards with its Delphic Sosa decision a few years ago.

My own views on corporate liability in international generally, and ATS actions particularly, are firmly that, well, there isn't any such thing in positive international law as it currently exists. It wasn't an oversight to be "gap-filled" by the Federal courts, even it such a thing were appropriate - lots of countries have expressed strong views that, for whatever reasons, in various important treaties they did not want to include corporate liability and so they did not. I talked about this as a black letter law issue in an expert declaration I offered for corporate defendants in the last of the Agent Orange cases, downloadable here.

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