Environmental protection

By Sara Rosenbaum, Harold and Jane Hirsh Professor, Health Law and Policy, George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. This post is part of an ACSblog online symposium around oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act. 

When the curtain rises on the Affordable Care Act arguments before the United States Supreme Court, the nation will be fully engaged in what is perhaps the most important legal examination in generations regarding Congress’s constitutional powers to tackle issues of unsurpassed social and economic concern. Although Chief Justice Roberts has likened the role of the courts to that of an umpire in a baseball game, one can hope that the Justices will view the case for its broader significance for the health care system as a whole, as well as for the 32 million children and adults whose access to health insurance rests great measure in their hands. A declaration that the Act is unconstitutional will not merely nullify its provisions. Under federal budgeting principles, it will effectively roll the federal health reform spending baseline back to zero. The likelihood that Congress will, anytime soon, find the $1.5 trillion needed to make coverage affordable for nearly all Americans is slim to nil, something that the Act’s opponents frankly are banking on.

It was perhaps inevitable that health care would be the issue to trigger a full-throated debate over the constitutional relationship between the federal government and American society. The signature domestic policy achievement of the Obama Administration, the Act stands as a testament to lawmakers’ ability to devise national solutions that simultaneously weave a wide array of existing laws – Medicaid for the poorest Americans, tax subsidies for low and moderate income individuals and families, and federal laws that regulate the behavior of insurers in the marketplace – into a complex legislative intervention of universal scope and impact.

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.