The article, “On the Frontier of Alien Tort Claims,” (NYLJ, July 19) Lee G. Dunst decries the recent expansive use of that statute and asks that the U.S. Supreme Court rein in what he calls a “Wild West environment.” However, the Supreme Court has already spoken in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 542 U.S. 692, and has rejected the narrow interpretation he urges. And the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has carefully allowed certain claims to proceed in cases with egregious facts, tantamount to violations of the law of nations, such as in Abdullahi v. Pfizer, 562 F.3d 163 (2009), which aptly compared Pfizer’s medical experiments in Africa to those conducted by the Nazi regime.
In Bodner v. Banque Paribas, 114 F.Supp.2d 117, the Eastern District permitted claims against banks which had aided and abetted the Vichy and Nazi regimes in plundering the plaintiffs’ assets.
