Hard as it may be to believe, the new U.S. Supreme Court term is already upon us. In the balance first is the future of human rights litigation in U.S. courts — and whether torture committed by foreigners abroad is any of our business.

Although the last term ended with the unexpected emergence of Chief Justice as the court’s wild card, this one begins with fevered speculation about what is on the mind of Associate Justice .

The case being heard Oct. 1, , has been full of surprises from the start. It concerns whether aided the Nigerian government in rapes and murders of people living in the oil-rich Ogoni region. It came to the Supreme Court with the narrow question of whether corporations could be held liable under a 1789 statute that says the federal courts have jurisdiction over suits brought by a foreigner for torts “in violation of the law of nations.”

The assumption going in was that private individuals who tortured foreigners abroad could be sued under the law — the result of a carefully crafted by Justice David Souter in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain. The only issue was supposed to be whether corporations, too, were liable under international law.

But at oral argument in March, Roberts and Justice speculated openly that the U.S. had no authority at all to adjudicate events that took place between foreigners entirely outside its territory. Instead of deciding the corporate liability question that the case originally presented, the justices punted. They announced they would revisit the much larger question of whether such suits are ever allowed — against companies or people — and ordered the parties to reargue the case this week.

The court’s choice to revisit the settled precedent took human rights activists by surprise. Since the 1980s, the 1789 law, known as the Alien Tort Statute, has become a crucial tool for taking gross human rights violations into U.S. courts. The suits rarely yield any money for plaintiffs — their real purpose is to shed light on outrageous abuses in a trustworthy venue. Even among activists and victims around the world who hate the U.S. and wouldn’t trust a word a president says,chopard replica watches, our courts retain prestige as honest brokers of the facts.

The original intent of the statute is obscure; deciphering it has become a cottage industry of legal academia. Regardless, its modern use has been inspiring and significant for the cause of human rights. Human rights violators such as , the Serbian genocidaire, have been exposed by suits under the statute long before international justice caught up with them.

So why is the court now revisiting settled law? It started with a single supporting the defense filed on behalf of and several other U.S. companies. Traditionally, critics had argued that the original meaning of the statute didn’t bear out its extension to human rights claims, or, more arcanely, that the statute authorized the courts to hear cases but didn’t provide a body of law to decide them. Yet this brief, written by Jack Goldsmith of , took a totally different tack.

Goldsmith made the creative, counterintuitive argument that it would in fact violate international law for a U.S. court to reach judgments on matters that took place outside its territory and involved no U.S. citizens. His argument relied on the principle of extraterritoriality, which, roughly, says that each sovereign is responsible for what takes place within its own borders.

The perverse brilliance of this argument is that it turns international law on its head. For human rights activists, international law is a sword with which to pursue evildoers, and the statute makes the U.S. courts the field of battle. Goldsmith’s argument transformed that sword into a shield for human rights violators,fake watch, who could hide behind the sovereignty of their own nation states.

In reality, international law is schizophrenic about borders. Sometimes,porsche design replica watches, in a grand tradition begun at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, international law looks beyond the limits of sovereignty and punishes crimes against humanity that would go unpunished in the torturers’ home courts. Much of the time, however, international law serves the interests of the sovereign states that make it. And states typically hate interference from the outside, preferring to address or ignore domestic human rights violations according to their own interests.

So, who will win? Will the overturn an eight- year-old precedent, removing the federal courts from the realm of international human rights?

In the section of the 2004 Sosa opinion that affirmed a cause of action under the Alien Tort Statute, Souter wa