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corporate accountability

August 27, 2012
Courts Signal Hostility to NLRB Class Action Ruling
by Nicole Flatow

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling limiting class actions in AT&T v. Concepcion, the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling that gave hope to those seeking to hold their employers accountable.

The ruling invalidated an arbitration agreement that blocked employees from banding together as a class, and it was grounded in a provision of the National Labor Relations Act that protects employees’ right to act collectively. But in the months since the January ruling, all but a few courts have declined to adopt the NLRB’s reasoning, signaling that the administrative decision may not have the impact some had hoped.

Thompson Reuters’ Nate Raymond looks at 16 federal and state court decisions over the past seven months, and finds that 13 of them disregarded the NLRB’s decision. Some found that the Federal Arbitration Act controlled; others that only the Supreme Court’s Concepcion decision applies.

The initial NLRB decision, D.R. Horton, is still pending on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. And in one decision that did adopt the NLRB’s reasoning, the court distinguished Concepcion, which did not involve a conflict with the NLRA. But thus far, courts have signaled that the NLRB’s decision will have little impact on employees’ access to justice.

D.R. Horton is not the only case with the potential to preserve some limits on arbitration clauses.
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Access to Justice, Supreme Court, Other courts, Arbitration, AT&T v. Concepcion, corporate accountability, National Labor Relations Act, National Labor Relations Board, NLRB
March 5, 2012
Supreme Court Widens Scope of Case on Corporate Accountability for Human Rights
by Nicole Flatow

A case that started out as potentially the most significant test of corporate personhood since Citizens United v. FEC may now be decided on other grounds.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered another round of arguments in Kiobel v. Shell Petroleum, this time on the question of whether the 200-year-old Alien Tort Statute applies to human rights violations that occur outside the United States.

The ATS and another related statute, the Torture Victim Protection Act, have been used to hold corporations accountable when they commit or are complicit in human rights abuses that include genocide, war crimes and forced labor.

The Supreme Court initially granted review of Kiobel on the question of whether the corporate entities themselves could be held accountable.

But as Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr points out, a ruling on the broader issue of whether U.S. courts can review actions arising elsewhere would “potentially impose more sweeping limits on lawsuits, shielding corporate officers as well as the companies themselves.”

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Access to Justice, Environmental protection, Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Alien Tort Statute, Citizens United v. FEC, corporate accountability, Corporations and the Courts, Human Rights, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Torture Victim Protection Act
February 28, 2012
Supreme Court Hears Major Corporate Human Rights Case
Guest Post

By Susan Farbstein and Tyler Giannini, Associate Clinical Director and Clinical Director of Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. Farbstein and Giannini are co-counsel in two Alien Tort Statute cases and have submitted amicus curiae briefs in numerous others, including in support of the petitioners in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court hears the most important human rights case of the term. Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. will determine the fate of corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”), a 1789 law passed by the First Congress. The plaintiffs allege Shell’s complicity in killings and crimes against humanity committed in Nigeria during the 1990s. Now the Supreme Court must decide whether corporations who profit from human rights abuse are exempt from civil liability for these activities — even though natural persons are unquestionably liable for the same acts.

The case has attracted a slew of amicus briefs and recent press coverage. On one side, those like John Bellinger, a former U.S. State Department Legal Advisor, argue for completely exempting corporations from suit under the ATS. On the other side are those like Ka Hsaw Wa, the Executive Director of EarthRights International, who notes the importance of these cases to survivors of corporate abuse, and Peter Weiss, the Vice President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who rightly points out that total corporate immunity would give corporations more rights and legal protections than people.

The debate stems from a 2010 Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which held that people could be sued under the ATS, but corporations could not. That ruling broke with more than a decade of jurisprudence in which numerous courts had repeatedly found or assumed that corporations could be sued under the statute.

Mr. Bellinger asserts that because the alleged violations often take place abroad, corporate ATS cases should not be allowed in U.S. courts. Corporations, however, routinely answer in U.S. courts for their activities overseas, whether in contract cases or run-of-the-mill product liability claims. And when there is a better forum to hear a case, defendants can — and do — request that the case be moved. Yet under Mr. Bellinger’s view even when there is no alternate forum, a suit still should not be allowed to proceed here against U.S.-based corporations. He would deny survivors of human rights abuses even this last resort.

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Access to Justice, Economic inequality, Environmental protection, Supreme Court, Alien Tort Statute, corporate accountability, Corporations and the Courts, Guest Post, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum
February 23, 2012
Can Corporations Violate Human Rights?
Guest Post

By John Knox, a law professor at Wake Forest University School of Law and a member scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform. This commentary is cross-posted at CPRBlog.

On February 28, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum, a case with far-reaching implications for efforts to hold corporations accountable when they commit or are complicit in abuses of human rights.

For over fifty years, Shell has extracted oil from Nigeria, causing great harm to the environment and people of the Niger delta. The Ogoni people living in the delta protested Shell’s operations, and in response the Nigerian government harshly oppressed them. Most infamously, in 1995 it executed the author Ken Saro-Wiwa, together with eight other leaders of the protests.

Esther Kiobel, the widow of one of the executed men, as well as other affected Ogoni, sued Shell in U.S. federal court, claiming that it aided and abetted the Nigerian government in its violations of human rights law. The plaintiffs relied on the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a law enacted by the First Congress, in 1789, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over claims by aliens arising from torts committed in violation of international law. In 2004, in Sosa v Alvarez-Machain, the Supreme Court affirmed that the ATS still provides jurisdiction for international tort claims, but it cautioned federal courts not to recognize claims “for violations of any international law norm with less definite content and acceptance among civilized nations than the historical paradigms” familiar when the law was enacted. As an example of such a historical paradigm, the Court cited the long-standing prohibition against piracy.

Foreign plaintiffs have used the ATS to accuse corporations of committing grave human rights abuses, including genocide, war crimes, and forced labor. A few of the suits have resulted in payments, including a 2009 settlement by Shell of another claim arising from its Nigerian operations. In 2010, however, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Esther Kiobel’s claim on the sweeping ground that corporations could never be liable for violations of customary international law, because customary international law never imposes any obligations on corporations. In short order, the Seventh, Ninth, and D.C. Circuits rejected the Second Circuit decision, holding that plaintiffs can sue corporations under the Alien Tort Statute.

Last fall, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the Second Circuit decision. Its ruling will be its first ATS decision since Sosa, and it will determine whether the many other pending ATS suits against corporations may continue. It’s possible that the Court will decide the case on grounds that allow it to avoid addressing corporate duties under international law. But if the Supreme Court does take on international law, as seems likely, what should it decide? Is the Second Circuit correct that international norms do not prohibit corporate abuses of human rights?

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Tags:
Access to Justice, Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Alien Tort Statute, corporate accountability, corporate personhood, Corporations and the Courts, Guest Post, Human Rights, International Law, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum