“Your honor, we do not urge a rule of corporate impunity here,” Kathleen Sullivan of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan told the U.S. Supreme Court at oral argument in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. Although Shell’s counsel are asking the Court to affirm the Second Circuit’s conclusion in Kiobel that corporations can’t be held liable under the the Alien Tort Statute, they stress that corporations can still be sued under state law. What they don’t stress is that, when those state claims arrive, the defense will try to eviscerate them.
An exquisitely timed conference was held at UC Irvine School of Law on March 2, three days after U.S. Supreme Court arguments in Kiobel, to assess the prospects of human rights litigation under state law. I began the conference with enthusiasm, because I’ve begun to worry that alien tort litigation will be recalled as an intellectually fascinating blind alley. Unfortunately for plaintiffs, and for anyone who believes in corporate accountability, I left feeling that the future of state human rights litigation is shaky.
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