Alien Tort Statute - Freeing Foreign Corporations from the U.S. Federal Jurisdiction

The United States Alien Tort Statute(ATS), as a jurisdictional statute, has been a very useful tool for alien plaintiffs to invoke subject-matter jurisdiction in U.S. federal courts against corporations, foreign or United States, committing torts in violations of international law, whether the underlying tortious activities occurred in the territories within as well as outside the United States. However, the United States Supreme Court had shown its reluctance to be involved in the ATS lawsuits, but has been demanded to answer to some arguable issues, such as, whether the ATS expands its liability to corporations and whether the ATS applies to their corporate activities outside the territory of the United States. This paper overviews the ATS, by reviewing how the U.S. Supreme Court tried to limit the scope of the ATS and rejected the ATS lawsuits by narrowly interpreting the ATS in its decisions in Sosa in 2004, Kiobel in 2013, and Jesner in 2018. These precedents of the Court may show how the rationale to utilize the principle of presumption against extraterritoriality of the U.S. laws had developed in its decisions, and why the U.S. Supreme Court has a tendency not to be involved in the ATS lawsuits against foreign corporations.