Over the years, we have addressed in this column U.S. court decisions concerning some of the more interesting issues in the area of international dispute resolution. In today’s column, we revisit some of those issues in the context of recent decisions relating to the following subjects: the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), enforcement in the United States of arbitral awards vacated abroad and manifest disregard of the law.
The Alien Tort Statute
Enacted in 1789 as part of the first Judiciary Act, the ATS1 provides the federal courts with jurisdiction to hear non-U.S. plaintiffs’ claims related to a violation of the “law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”2 Historically, the ATS was rarely invoked until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit breathed life into it with Filartiga v. Pena-Irala3 in 1980. In the last 15 years, plaintiffs’ attorneys and human rights organizations have increasingly employed the ATS against corporate defendants, often charging them with aiding and abetting foreign governments and quasi-governmental entities in carrying out wrongful acts against the citizens of their own countries. These cases have been of obvious concern to corporations because successful plaintiffs in ATS claims have been awarded multi-million dollar verdicts, which are the result of a substantial punitive component to the damages.4
