International law roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

More: The New York Times’s Room for Debate discussion includes a contribution by my Cato colleague Ilya Shapiro. And Point of Law is having a featured discussion on the case with David Weissbrodt of the University of Minnesota and Julian Ku of Hofstra.

Supreme Court to review Alien Tort Statute is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

September 29 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

November 15 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Goodbye Alien Tort Statute? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

July 13 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

• As Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith note in the Washington Post, a federal court recently allowed to proceed a lawsuit seeking to blame the evils of South African apartheid on Western multinationals, even despite strong opposition to the suit from both the U.S. government’s executive branch and today’s duly elected multiracial South African government. Unfortunately, the State Department’s up-to-now-staunch opposition to this and similar lawsuits is imperiled by the installment of Harold Koh as legal adviser at Foggy Bottom: “Koh is an intellectual architect and champion of the post-1980 human rights litigation explosion. He joined a brief in the South Africa litigation arguing for broad aiding-and-abetting liability.”
• If asked what should happen to frozen Cuban-government assets under U.S. control, reasonable possibility #1 might be “hold them against the eventual day when a non-tyrannical regime emerges there, it will need help.” Reasonable possibility #2 might be “divide the assets among Castro’s many victims in some deliberate and step-by-step way, knowing that their injuries are so numerous and severe that even very deserving victims will get only small payments”. The answer you’d think makes no sense at all is “encourage first-come-first-served tort lawsuits, so that the first couple of cases to maneuver their way through the legal process get handsome compensation, while no money is left for either #1 or #2″. So naturally, the latter is what our legal system is doing, previously in $188 million and $253 million verdicts involving single incidents or families, and now in a new case in which the family of Gustavo Villoldo has been awarded $1.179 billion. One of the plaintiff’s lawyers in the case actually boasts that the new award may obstruct a warming of relations between the U.S. and a post-Castro successor regime: “with the opening of relations between the U.S. and Cuba to come, there are debts to society to be paid before that happens” (more on Che Guevara, via).
• On the brighter side, the Obama administration has joined its Bush predecessors in correctly drawing a line against litigation by some September 11 victims and insurance companies: under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, the courts are no place to pursue theories trying to link the rulers of Saudi Arabia to the terrorist attacks.

(cross-posted from Point of Law)

“The U.S. Can’t Be the World’s Court” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Fraud alleged in banana-worker sterility claims is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

seeking more than $400 billion from companies that did business in South Africa during apartheid, [which] score high on what I call Taylor’s Index of Completely Worthless Lawsuit Indicators:

• The lawsuits will do victims of wrongdoing little or no good.

• They will penalize no human being who has done anything wrong.

• They will deter more conduct that is beneficial than harmful.

• The legal costs and any damages will come at the expense of the general public.

• The lawsuits therefore serve no purpose at all but to enrich lawyers and provide ideological power trips for some judges as well as lawyers.

American Isuzu Motors v. Ntsebeza, recently allowed to go forward, is being led by (among others) class-actioneer and frequent Overlawyered mentionee Michael Hausfeld.

The apartheid lawsuit is one of dozens seeking to pervert the Alien Tort Statute to mulct companies for ordinary commercial conduct in countries accused of human-rights violations. Caterpillar, for example, was sued for selling bulldozers that Israel used to destroy suspected Palestinian terrorists’ homes. (The case was dismissed.) “The American bar is actively soliciting alien plaintiffs” to try out novel theories, State Department legal adviser John Bellinger noted in a recent speech. Because so many federal judges have smiled on such suits, Bellinger added, foreign governments increasingly regard the U.S. judiciary “as something of a rogue actor.”

With added commentary on the Kivalina climate-change class action, Rhode Island lead paint, shareholder litigation, and Lerach, Weiss, and Scruggs. (National Journal, May 17, will rotate off page so catch it now).

“Lawsuits that benefit only lawyers” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

May 19 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system