In 1789, the First United States Congress passed the Judiciary Act to establish the federal court system. Tucked inside was a 33-word provision known as the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), granting federal district courts jurisdiction over civil actions brought by non-U. S.
citizens for torts committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States. Intended originally to address diplomatic incidents like assaults on foreign ambassadors or high-seas piracy, the statute was rarely invoked and sat largely forgotten in American jurisprudence for nearly two hundred years. That changed dramatically in 1980 with the landmark case Filártiga v.
Peña-Irala. Joelito Filártiga, a young Paraguayan man, had been tortured to death in Paraguay by a police inspector named Américo Peña-Irala. When Peña-Irala later moved to Brooklyn, Filártiga's family filed a civil suit against him in U.
S. federal court using the forgotten 1789 law. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that modern international law explicitly prohibited official torture, opening the floodgates for foreign victims of human rights abuses to seek justice in American courts regardless of where the atrocities took place.
For three decades, the ATS was used to sue foreign warlords, dictators, and multinational corporations accused of complicity in atrocities worldwide, until subsequent Supreme Court rulings narrowed its extraterritorial reach.