91 replies
20h31m
The Alien Tort Statue [1], the reason this case [2] is in the US at all has sometimes been used for significant environmental and social justice global legal activism. Because of this, it is in the sights of the conservative legal movement. Sadly I suspect this case may end up at the supreme court and end up another victim of the removal of redress for the evil of the powerful.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/alien_tort_statute
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4232180/in-re-chiquita-...
So basically every corporation operating in the US has to follow US law at all times, regardless of the economic/legal circumstances in other countries?
I can see why that is controversial and almost certainly will be extremely selectively enforced.
It is wild to me how some people can throw something like this out as this like, unreasonable and clearly sarcastic question like, what you expect a corporation to follow the law everywhere? And I'm just over here like... yeah? Yeah. I... always did, really, I never considered that if I formed a corporation I could fund death squads in other countries to maintain access to cheap products. What the hell is wrong with you where you thought that was not only desirable, but a normal situation...?
I grew up very conservative and pro-free-market, and honestly a huge part of my transition to being a pinko commie scum was recognizing just how FUCKED big businesses are, especially overseas. Like you have the banal stuff like tax sheltering which is shitty but like, it's just money but then, oh MAN, they get up to some truly horrific shit. Death squads, union breaking, cataclysmic environmental damage, and it's 100% enabled by our system. I hope that this trend continues and we can finally get some justice out of these organizations that have clearly overstepped in so many ways.
If we’re talking about crimes like “murder”, yes, it’s pretty clear.
If we’re talking about crimes like “bribing a public official”, it’s less so. There are countries where that is simultaneously 1) technically illegal by that country’s own laws, 2) absolutely an expected and required part of doing business. So what do you do in that case?
idk, I see it the other way around actually. if you kill someone in another country, that's still bad, but it's not clear why the US government should be the entity that holds you accountable for it. seems more appropriate to turn you over to that country's government upon request.
whereas if you bribe public officials in other countries as normal business practice, that might give you an advantage over other companies that also operate in the US. if they have to also engage in bribery to compete with you, that seems like a much more direct harm to another US entity.
This would make it very easy for Americans to be mercenaries and assassins for foreign governments.
aren't they? :p
Why stop there and not take it to the next step? Surely company A killing whistleblowers or rabble rousers overseas lets it outperform company B that isn’t doin that state-side? Doesn’t that encourage company B to do the same on red, white, and blue soil?
are A and B both operating in the US in your example? if yes, then USG has a legitimate interest in removing that perverse incentive. if not, then the US criminal justice system seems like the wrong place to solve the problem.
my point is that the jurisdiction of the US criminal justice system should be limited to the US. if people do things in another country that demonstrably harm US residents, that's fair game. otherwise, it seems like an overreach for the US to enforce laws that might not even exist in other countries. just my opinion, you don't have to agree.
Anyone who has ever worked for a medium-large corporation will have done the inevitable employee training that, among many other things, tells you that "no, you cannot pay bribes or facilitation payments in another country even if it's normal and expected there, and yes you and us can still be prosecuted at home for that".
Which can be code for: “We have specialists[0] for sensitive in-country negotiations.”
[0]. Arms-length, third-party, paper-trail-negative contractors.
Sounds lucrative.
so very true
IANAL, but I believe that under US law you are allowed to pay bribes to get someone to do their job in places where that is customary. You just aren't allowed to pay bribes to get someone to do something that they aren't supposed to do.
Not quite.
You may be thinking of the “grease payment” exception [1] to the FCPA [2]. Customariness isn’t as important as whether the payment is to speed up a decided outcome or effect the outcome.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitating_payment
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Ac...
You just don't do business in such countries? Why do you want to work with corrupt regimes so much?
One could make the argument that if the corporation is required by law in all the non-legal countries to abide by those laws and not bribe officials that the practice will necessarily have to die out among the few countries you would be arguing for, simply because the risk is too great to the corporation. Maybe it would be maintained among local businesses, but it would be an understood fact that a politician could not expect a broad multi-national to participate in it, irrespective of their desire or willingness, if they stood to face prosecution from... however many countries they operate in, all of whom would demand a penalty be served. Even if they're slap-on-the-wrist penalties, that's going to add up real fast.
The issue has nothing to do with conservatism versus liberalism, but sovereignty. Why should the US get to make law for the whole world, and then enforce that law in US courts?
The funny thing about the leftist children of Reaganites is that they maintain their parents’ universalism and lack of respect for foreign sovereignty. “Maybe America should fuck off and mind its own business” is never part of the political conversion.
I want to say something and I promise I say it not as a dig on you... as someone who's followed you for more than 10 years, I am fascinated that despite the many, many changes and revisions in your belief systems over the years, something that never changes is the certainty and conviction and confidence in your tone.
I guess it's a good thing, wish I had it. Makes for persuasive and effective writing, that's for sure.
On this issue, I don't think there's been a change. I don't believe in universalism, which Americans on both the left and right tend to do. I opposed the Iraq War because I thought America had no business trying to bring democracy to Iraq (and knew Iraqi society couldn't handle democracy). Similarly, I oppose current U.S. efforts to impose universal norms. America shot a bunch of striking workers and polluted the environment on the way to becoming rich. Why shouldn't Bangladesh have that same prerogative?
America is not enforcing its laws on some random people outside its borders, its regulating the behavior of people who are very much subject to our legal system. I am quite surprised to see there's a contingent of folks who think that leaving our borders means you can do whatever you want and expect to be welcomed back
The Alien Tort Statute applies specifically to "aliens" not Americans. It's about holding foreigners liable for conduct on foreign soil in U.S. courts.
Other countries are free to levy such fines for offenses they deem worthy and have done so in the past certainly. The US does not have exclusive right to this.
Err, which one? You've mentioned a few different things. :)
The company in question managed to get the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala and replace it with a military dictatorship.
wait - was the argument that the laws of these other countries they were operating in required them to fund paramilitary death squads? I must have missed that part.
I'm thinking the slope is not as slippery as feared here.
on edit: Ok I read your Mexican cartel example, slipperiness still not apparent to me how one slides from we hired death squads that killed people to we hired a cartel for protection but the money we paid was put in a big pile of money that cartel used to also fund bad stuff the cartel did that hurt people who were not trying to damage our company.
at any rate the amount of money paid out here having people killed is the usual cost of doing business slap on the wrist considering Chiquita's size and doesn't actually affect them. The negative publicity is worse.
continuing instead of editing:
I mean actually this is probably the rule for most countries regarding some laws at least - EU companies as I understand the law need to follow GDPR when outside EU, there are laws against bribery and money laundering that work across nations despite what the economic/legal circumstances are in play in other countries.
Luckily though I believe every country in the world that is not a fictional dystopia actually has laws against corporations paying to have people killed so it probably doesn't matter much in this case anyway.
Non-EU companies need to follow GDPR when serving EU customers, yes. There are many websites that geoblock EU visitors because they don't want to comply with GDPR.
But the EU only enforces that for transactions involving EU citizens. If you want to grab all the data from US visitors, go for it, the EU will not complain (as long as you don't do it to EU visitors).
I think the difference here is that the US is enforcing US law on an operation in a foreign country by a company that operates in the US. The equivalent would be the EU enforcing GDPR for all site transactions, regardless of the visitor's nationality.
The point of making this distinction is that there are countries that have laws that we don't want to follow (e.g. various Middle East countries having drastic punishments for atheism and apostasy), and that should not be applied to people (or organisations) who don't reside there. If the USA makes the precedent that it can enforce its domestic law on actions happening in other countries, then it's possible that (e.g.) Australia could enforce its ridiculous anti-online-bullying laws on US citizens who have never left the USA.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
Notice how they emphasized EU citizens? Yeah, neither did I.
Reading over the post I realize they meant that companies in the U.S need to handle EU citizens data properly but they can do what they want with U.S citizens data, which I misunderstood so my apologies on the misunderstanding.
which of course is not an exactly correct understanding - no American company without holdings in Europe needs to worry about what they do with their websites accessed by European citizens.
The don't emphasize citizenship because it is enough to live in the EU for the law to apply, i.e. immigrants etc. are included.
If you look into the actual GDPR, you will find the phrase "data subjects who are in the Union", which are "natural persons", for whom the data protection laws apply.
oh good! Cause I've done that.
tourists who are in the union also apply, there is no idea that you can figure out if that person is just traveling through the EU for some months you can do what you want with them.
https://www.dataprotectionreport.com/2018/12/edpb-clarifies-...
on edit: if you were just clarifying/backing up my original point, sorry, I thought it seemed you were going with interpretation of the person who I was replying to an EU company can do what they want with any U.S citizen's data.
Again, there is already ample precedent for this
https://www.trade.gov/us-foreign-corrupt-practices-act
this applies to any U.S company engaging in business in another country.
Well, perhaps that Chiquita used to be an American company affects the situation, not sure here, since Chiquita is nowadays a Swiss company.
Uh, yes? There are dozens of specific US laws that govern this and tons of existing case law that committing a serious crime overseas is punishable in the US regardless of its legality elsewhere.
The Travel Act for example makes it illegal to fly to another country to engage in sexual acts with a minor, even if it is legal in that country. Do you think that is some sort of government overreach?
Yes because it is a breach to the principle of jurisdiction and it's ultimately based on American imperialism.
Mind you, Id gladly have pedos and banana execs shot in public.
The thing that's a bit scary about that Travel Act is: what happens when US laws change?
Instead of having sex with minors, suppose the US elected some crazy religious zealots who managed to make it illegal to have sex outside of heterosexual marriage, after getting abortion banned (so, not exactly far-fetched). So does that mean that all "US persons" (citizens, green card holders, residents, etc.) who travel (or live) outside the US and have sex with someone they're not married to are now criminals?
If we're keeping with consistency... yes.
This is the key.
Everyone is happy to give the government extra power for things they don’t like but rarely consider they would use it for things they don’t like
The relevant principle of jurisdiction here is that a state has jurisdiction over the acts of its citizens. It's not uncommon and it's certainly not just a US thing (eg. here is a Brazilian court convicting one of its citizens over a murder committed in Australia: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/23/cecilia-haddad... ).
I don't need no stinkin' god (State)!
What might you say about war crimes? When was the last time we had a large scale war within the borders of the U.S.? Should the wars that have taken place since been free of such prosecution since they were overseas?
I feel like the US government has a legitimate interest in making sure US corporations don't pay paramilitary death squads for drug traffickers, especially ones that the US had designated as terrorist organizations at the time.
I don't think it's really that controversial to prevent US companies from doing this.
But to be clear they had already pled guilty to doing that crime in 2007 (and they also prosecuted the AUC, many AUC leaders were extradited to the US in 2008).
This isn't about enforcement at all, this is them being found liable in a civil class action lawsuit, one brought by families of folks the AUC murdered.
Yes I'm aware of the details
That's exactly what I mean for extremely selective enforcement
Say some hypothetically medium/small US business with some operations in Mexico has their employees stalked/intimidated and their equipment gets burned down and people with guns hang out in the office, usual cartel stuff that happens daily there
Then they go to the Mexican gov for help and find out they don't give a shit because they are paid off or worse directly working for the cartel (as this particular Colombian paramilitary group was notorious for being protected by the gov).
So they pay money to some local cartel to make them go away
This is bad yes and should be punished.
But I don't see how that behaviour at all should allow civil action by random families from Mexico who were harmed (indirectly) by the same Cartel to make a case in the US
That's the most disconnected and roundabout form of justice imagineable.
Their crime should have rightfully been procescuted by Colombia at the time or the US sanctioning them. That is the real deterence. Civil courts in the US have no business playing judge in that context IMO. Unless your goal is feel good emotions by giving victims of crime money by takkng money from another party coerced by the same criminals.
Traditionally it's more like "they pay money to some local armed group to get rid of union activists and unruly workers asking for more rights and better conditions and salaries".
Yes, where the "union activists and unruly workers" represent the rival armed group.
Yes, because real workers are never exploited and never have legitimate concerns and demands, especially in developing world countries /s
It's not like such companies like Chiquita even support dictators or topple goverments (or lobby to get it done on their behalf) to protect their margins and cheap labour...
"Among the Honduran people, the United Fruit Company was known as El Pulpo ("The Octopus" in English), because its influence pervaded Honduran society, controlled their country's transport infrastructure, and manipulated Honduran national politics with anti-labour violence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
Well, feel good justice isnt even just one part here because justice isnt the primary goal of a legal system. Your premise is wrong.
Its about punishment to enforce the civil contract and once you exclude bodies, eg drug trafficing CIA officials or sociopathical CEOs, you start to loose credibility.
So then only attorneys are left to lead the charge, right? How can you still trust a system that prosecutes journalists that uncover war crimes that get covered up by the same cartel?
Governments can and cooperate on international crimes, and the US has more resources to prosecute US corporations.
Columbia extradited the AUC leaders.
It's kind of ironic, as the US wants every other country to follow their laws too sometimes (patents, copyright, probably more).
For the extra cup of strange irony, part of the government in my country (Australia) just tried forcing X to delete posts for everyone globally instead of just not showing them to Australian users. Thankfully the court system told the Aust gov to bugger off due to overreach. ;)
That's still good.
Austrian courts forced Meta to delete certain posts globally. That's some crazy overreach.
https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/die-gru....
Wow, that seems pretty insane. :(
Welcome to Austrian "free speech".
I didn’t hear about the tweets. What are they about?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/05/x...
Non-US corporations are held to the same standard. US court making frivolous jurisdiction claims is nothing new.
There are certain crimes that might take place outside the US that the US enforces on US citizens/entities. E.g. war crimes.
Notable claim from part of that link: corporations are persons, but cannot be sued like a person can.
Yes. Just like Californians, non-Americans and children are all natural persons with varying rights, Delaware C corporations, New York non-profits and unions are all legal persons with different rights.
This seems like a blatant abuse of the term person.
Fictitious personhood is older than childhood personhood (or universal natural personhood, for that matter). To the degree we need a better term, it’s for natural persons.
It’s a logical consequence of assembly, tracing back thousands of years to trade guilds and municipalities needing the ability to stand in court as a collective.
Anyone who thinks we should end it should consider the consequences of requiring a find-and-replace exercise across our entire body of law, specifying which persons each statute and case applies to, and then prepare for an endless game of whack-a-mole as new categories of person are created. (Murder is legal if you’re a DAO!)
Strangely enough, we've ignored that "find-and-replace across the body of law" in the past. Even the new gender laws ignore existing laws. I sometimes wish that we had written a compiler for law. And a statically typed language designed for compiling policy (think Rego + Rust). Politicians and Law makers would have to test their new proposals in code before wasting anyone else's time on it. Lawyers would have to learn the language and compiler tools as part of their study, but anyone in the country would have access to them so that they could run their own tests and even settle minor legal disputes without having to pay lawyers. New laws that cause compiler errors don't get through, unless you can first unblock them with a refactor (which must also compile without errors). I think it's obvious that an attempt to encode the current statue book would fail miserably. You might have to start off an extremely simplistic set of rules (kinda like RocoCop's prime directives or Moses' 10 commandments) because I think we can all generally agree that killing is wrong generally. Ok, add a law "thou shake not kill". Oh, but what if someone's trying to kill you or your child? "Killing is wrong unless X is true". At the very least it would be an interesting exercise.
I look forward to when code can express the richness of natural languages. In the meantime, formally-declared law is a fantasy. (Exhibit A: any court opinion.)
Every civilisation has a leader who thought they could reïnvent law from first principles. Nobody uses their systems. (Legal axioms ultimately track to time immemorial, i.e.g prehistory.)
Murder vs manslaugher vs self defence vs execution vs being stabbed by a soldier is a good lens into law. (Or, to be provocative, eating meat.)
It's a popular in laws school. In its failure one learns of the intersection between culture and the law and why VHS beat Betamax.
Very good! I think these are all interpretations of the same type of event. Do you know the Russell conjugation?
Sure. But legally--and culturally--very different. If someone doesn't see that, they probably shouldn't be commenting on the law. (Practically speaking, they probably aren't.)
Right. We are talking about social conventions, not right or wrong. This is plain when we see that the same action can be legal in one country, and a serious crime in another. It's simply the rules of the game, no different to Scrabble or poker. How the individual engages with the culture/game is their business. Similarly, if an individual is able to direct the creation of rules in their favour, why shouldn't they?
Social constructs are socially constructed. Given social systems are heterogenous, this variation is far from profound. (It’s almost corollary.)
In the way Duplos and dielectric physics are the same.
One usually can’t.
Not really. I imagine its fine to shoot a burglar in the US who breaks in your house, but you could go to jail for murder in the UK. Soldiers can kill civilians without consequences. So can governments (death row, in the US).
I think most(/all?) law is created this way. Eg a pretty small collection of individuals that have the sway in a corporation use the corporation to pay lobbyists to draft laws to benefit them (creating a moat, force individuals to pay (health insurance), etc, etc). This is done in the name of serving the public interest. The political class then rubber stamps these proposals, in order to receive a seat on the board on retiring from politics.
lol, you picked out my "Killing is wrong unless X is true" quote but ignored my follow up which acknowledges that prime directives are insufficiently flexible. I'm not even suggesting starting off a legal system from scratch. I'm saying that it would be good to begin by encoding our current system into a purpose-built language and compiler, and of course one should start with the basics and build upon it, using the language and compiler to find inconsistencies, clashes etc.
I think your point may be that laws currently do have nuance (eg murder vs manslaughter vs...) which is all fine. By all means load those rules into the system too, but the point of the language and compiler is that while you're doing this you pay attention to compiler errors along the way and at least be aware when a change (to a rule, or the meaning of a term or type) caused some other change that you didn't expect. Eg: changing the meaning of a word here makes one law ambiguous and causes these two to clash.
Using it in law school is a great idea. It's where it should begin.
Your mistake here, imo, is that you think law is something other than an instrument of control. You believe that it is about codifying a set of good behaviours or something. The compilation errors are intentional, rich people are able to get the coder/solicitor to express the law in terms they want. The reality is that anything written down is a metaphor for the internal moral awareness of right and wrong, and as such can be subverted. We are each able to work out right from wrong, but if we believe we have to defer to a law book, we externalise our personal authority to a book.
Of course it's an instrument of control, but I'm happier with it than without. And if it exists, then let it make sense and be consistent.
Very cool, I’ve had very similar thoughts in the past.
Thinking about the law in this way actually made realize how the number of bugs there is actually low for what a clusterfuck it is.
I think that corporations' leadership (and anyone that aided in the process) not being held criminally accountable, not being stripped of their ill-gotten gains, and not having to pay reparations for the damages they caused is a very serious bug.
CVE 9.8/10.0 and all that.
oh, comeon. this is just responsibility laundering.
individual natural persons are implementing every act of these artificial hyperagents, and there is precedent and reason for holding individuals accountable for individual actions.
It's linguistics. Corporations were people in English before many folks of darker skin colour.
(OP argued the use is abusive. That is wrong. The term wasn't manipulated. Our world got kinder faster than our English.)
With responsibility comes power. (See: Tiberius.) If the CEO is entirely responsible for their corporation, then they are king. We've derived feudalism.
Etymonline[0] cites phrases like "person corporate" as linguistic precedent this use of the term, but the meaning "individual, human being" goes back to 1200. Legal rights notwithstanding, I don't think you're at all correct if you are suggesting that there was ever a stage of daily English usage where the word would be used to refer equally to free citizens and corporations, but not to slaves. And I'd certainly argue that today, the idea that a corporation can be referred to as a 'person' is very much a specialists' usage that does not at all align with its everyday use.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=person
Personhood has obviously applied to humans across languages for millennia. I’m not arguing that usage doesn’t predate corporate personhood in English; I’m saying many common uses of person today post-date corporate personhood.
Corporate personhood, and the referring of entities as persons, goes back to ancient Latin and multiple Indian languages for a reason: it’s a natural consequence of (a) collective rights and (b) polytheistic vesting, whereby “personhood” was understood in a broader context than even today [1]. (See: any spiritual practice that vests inanimate objects with a will and thus, in a sense or directly, personhood.)
Agree. But that doesn’t make it wrong. When you look at why it has that specialist usage, suspending the use makes zero sense. (It also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t debate its use.)
[1] https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/journal-briti...
I of course understand the necessity of representing collectives in a legal system, but given that we cannot apply many legal concepts people rely on to trust such a system (say, punishing bad behavior with more than just a fine), it stands to reason they shouldn't be granted many of the benefits, either. Perhaps if we could have the board or stockholders stand in and accept the punishment personally it would make more sense, but we seem very averse to this as a society for some reason. As a result these parties are likely to have predominantely negative effects on society that relies on the concept of meaningful liability.
I don't have much hope for fixing our body of laws, frankly. I don't think a good reaction to this realization is to accept them as rational or reasonable.
Your problem isn't with corporate personhood. It's with our quasi-aristocracy.
To that extent, complaining about legal entities is entirely a distraction. (Akin to how "corporate death penalties" distract from proportional fining. Red herrings littering the path.)
Have you studied them? They're precedented in millenia, not tweets, for good reason.
The statute uses the word “alien” (which generally refers to natural persons) not the word “person.”
The whole point of corporations is that they can sue and be sued like a natural person can - they have legal personhood, and can pursue and defend actions in their own name.
I assume the portion of the first link you're referring to is the section that starts
This is a question about the ATS and its scope specifically; the source is not discussing the nature of corporations generally.
It sounds like the scope of the ATS is fairly ill-defined, and that at various points courts have looked for whatever reasons they could to limit its scope, and whether a corporation was involved has just been one of those reasons.
I suspect the problem is more that the statute gives U.S. courts jurisdiction over conduct that happens in foreign countries, and applies incomprehensibly vague standards such as “the law of nations.” It’s a statute that made sense in 1789 when it was enacted by a bunch of people that thought God made universal law applicable to the whole world.
Yet the same people who are likely to be responsible if this law does get thrown out are totally fine with plenty of other laws that make a lot less sense today than in 1789. Let's not pretend that the same court who ruled that all firearm regulations need to be interpreted in the context of what people would have thought in the 18th century[1] would rule differently on a case covering the law we're discussing because of legitimate legal reasoning; they're happy throw out precedents from the most recent couple of centuries in favor of regressing to some ancient historical standard when it ends up with the result they want.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/politics-mississippi-state-govern...
That's not at all what Supreme Court ruled with regards to the 2nd amendment. They precisely said that contemporary laws related to firearms must be consistent with the centuries of jurisprudence we have on the limits and liberties enabled by the 2nd amendment. In your own words, states must not "throw out precedents from the most recent couple of centuries."
This law, by contrast, was enacted in 1789 but only invoked exactly twice until 1980. [1] Since then it seems to have been regularly enacted with very little in the way of jurisprudence to guide its purpose, limits, and overall meaning. It also suffers from an issue that it appeals to "international law" which is a term more subject to political than legal interpretation. Contemporary examples abounds.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Tort_Statute#History
The Supreme Court in this case was also not basing their opinion on fact, since there actually was jurisprudence about gun control [1]
Also, it doesn't make sense to say laws should perfectly adhere with jurisprudence. Laws are enacted and changed precisely because lawmakers don't like the results the legal framework is giving them up until that point in time. To whit, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights were enacted because the lawmakers at the time did not enjoy the British legal framework and their 'unwritten constitution' as they now like to call it.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fact-checking-the-sup...
You're expressing an extremely common misconception about the Constitution. The Constitution does not grant you e.g. the right to free speech or the right to bear arms. You already naturally have these rights. The way the Constitution works is to instead restrict what laws the government can pass. The government cannot simply say 'times have changed, we're going to pass laws banning speech and guns' because the Constitution expressly prohibits that.
So instead, if they want to do that, then they would need to amend the Constitution. And that's entirely possible - the process for that is well defined, and it has been done many times. It requires a supermajority vote in both the House and Senate, and then 75% of the US states agreeing to it. It's intentionally designed such that the Constitution will only change when there is overwhelming consensus across all affected groups.
The Supreme Court's role in all of those is exclusively to ensure that laws do not violate the Constitution.
Spirit of the law should still apply even if it's an old law. You should change the law if you want a different outcome. Things get very arbitrary when judges can decide a law is too old to apply - that's how communists did their revolutionary courts in many European countries.
The Second Amendment imposes a clear textual standard that makes as much sense today as it did in 1789. It's not like anyone is confused about what "bear arms" means. You might think that standard is bad policy today in light of intervening changes, and maybe you would add more caveats, but plenty of people disagree about that.
The Alien Tort Statute, by contrast, literally doesn't make sense--talking about the "law of nations" is like talking about the "aether" or "faeries." It's not even an originalism issue. Even in 1789, the Founders likely didn't intend for the ATS to e.g. allow suits in U.S. courts against the British East India Company for violations of "human rights."
I find it deeply ironic that such morally guided policy unravells a power projection machine only to then be replaced by another powers power projection machine void of values. A power that engages in values mimicry on the surface level and copies the colonial strategies it condemns. And in the end, the morally just but powerless are just written out of history. All the good intentions and they will have never existed.
Some kissinger minion will remove us from the internet archives to have a more correct history for the great leader. And lets not forget the physical, real disasters of antirealpolitics in Europe. Everyone scrambles to get nukes that idealists declared redundant.
In this game the moral and decent loose totally if they allow one player to gain enough power to flip the gameboard. Worser still the moral rightous ones become defacto usefool gamepieces rambling about "red lines & rules" of the opponents, while the littlefingers and kissingers play this game with one arm tied back. The blood in Ukraine is on your hands too, oh moral ones.
what?
Not really. Read Pareto's Circulation of the Elites.
The mistake is assuming all those who have some amout of power all have the same agenda.
Such a state is never possible purely because people's personalities, needs, values, environment exist in a wide spectrum. Littlefingers and kissengers loose something everytime they win.
Its like a virus cant kill the host without killing itself.
Back in my law school days I was part of our school’s Immigration and Human Rights Clinic that won a $22M judgment under the Alien Tort Statute Act on behalf of Liberian torture victims against “Chuckie” Taylor, son of Liberian President Charles Taylor.[1]
The background is the stuff of movies, Charles Taylor was a high ranking official in Liberia that fled to the US after being accused of embezzlement (principally from US contracts), he was arrested in the US and “escaped” from Federal prison, fled back to Africa where he was armed and funded by Gaddafi, and became President of Liberia after a coup. His campaign slogan was "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him.”
In fact both Charles and Chuckie are depicted in the Movie Lord of War, where Chuckie was the one who asks Nicolas Cage for the Rambo’s golden gun. Their brutality was also depicted in Blood Diamond, in neighboring Sierra Leon where they were behind Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and would cut people’s arms off (long sleeve/short sleeves for above/below the elbow) when they voted in elections, because voters hands/thumbs were inked as evidence of voting.
Chuckie interestingly was actually a born in the US and a private school kid. Then went to Liberia after Charles became President and became head of his anti-terrorists unit called the “demon forces”, the rest is the stuff of nightmares they leave out of the movies.
If you can read between the lines, this stuff goes to the highest levels of government and intelligence which is another reason the ATS Act is under attack.
[1] https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2010/02/fiu-im...