Thread by @nycsouthpaw

You can find the consolidated Alien Tort Statute oral arguments from this morning concerning corporate liability for involvement with slavery here. c-span.org/video/?477430-…

A passage from the corporate appellants’ opening brief in the Alien Torts Statute case draws on precedents rooted in the Holocaust to argue that corporations are not people for purposes of international human rights and war crimes laws. supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/1…

I question whether this is effective advocacy from @neal_katyal and his team — is a judge likely to be persuaded that refraining from indicting the entity that produced Zyklon B for the Nazis established an important tradition or that the example proves the absurdity of the idea?

It would have been easy to stick to more modest arguments for the appellants in this case — a bar on extraterritoriality and a failure in the pleadings to allege actual knowledge of the human rights abuses by the defendants.

Did the clients really gain anything from advancing and emphasizing this highly agro ‘corporate immunity from international law up to an including manufacturing the poison gas used to perpetrate a genocide’ argument as well? We’ll see, but I’m skeptical.