Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/17pdf/16-499_1a7d.pdf
Page Number: 52

Cite as:  584 U. S. ____ (2018) 

9 

Opinion of GORSUCH, J. 

Congress,  or  any  authority,  or  commission  derived  from
the United States.”  Caperton v. Bowyer, 14 Wall. 216, 228 
(1872).

Even  so,  that  hardly  left  the  ATS  without  important
work to perform.  At the time of the founding, “[i]f a nation 
failed to redress injuries by its citizens upon the citizens of 
another nation, the perpetrators’ nation violated the ‘per-
fect  rights’  of  the  other  nation,”  which  “provided  the  of-
fended nation with just cause for reprisals or war.”  Bellia 
& Clark, 78 U. Chi. L. Rev., at 476.3  This reality posed an
existential threat to the new nation.  Under the Articles of 
Confederation, States regularly refused to redress injuries
their  citizens  caused  foreigners.  British  creditors,  for 
example,  often  found  their  efforts  to  collect  debts  from
American  debtors  thwarted.    Id.,  at  498–501.  Seeking  to
remedy these and similar problems, the Continental Con-
gress in 1781 passed a resolution encouraging the States, 
among  other  things,  to  establish  tribunals  for  vindicating 
“offences  against  the  law  of  nations”  and  to  “authorise 
suits  to  be  instituted  for  damages  by  the  party  injured.” 
Id., at 495–496.  But the States did too little, too late.  So 
when the framers gathered to write the Constitution they 
included among their chief priorities endowing the national 

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3 As a leading treatise explained, a sovereign “ought not to suffer his
subjects to molest the subjects of others, or to do them an injury, much 
less should he permit them audaciously to offend foreign powers.”  E. de 
Vattel,  1  The  Law  of  Nations,  bk.  II,  §76,  p.  145  (1760).    Instead,  the 
nation  “ought  to  oblige  the  guilty  to  repair  the  damage,  if  that  be
possible,  to  inflict  on  him  an  exemplary  punishment,  or,  in  short,
according to the nature of the case, and the circumstances attending it,
to deliver him up to the offended state there to receive justice.”  Ibid.  A 
sovereign who “refuses to cause a reparation to be made of the damage
caused by his subject, or to punish the guilty, or, in short, to deliver him
up,  renders  himself  in  some  measure  an  accomplice  in  the  injury,  and
becomes  responsible  for  it.”  Id.,  §77,  at  145;  see  also  Bellia  &  Clark, 
The Alien Tort Statute and the Law of Nations, 78 U. Chi. L. Rev. 472– 
477 (2011).