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4 

NESTLE USA, INC. v. DOE 

GORSUCH, J., concurring 

to “oblige the guilty to repair the damage” would have pro-
vided  just  cause  for  reprisals  or  worse.   1  E.  de  Vattel, 
The Law of Nations, bk. II, §76, p. 145 (1760).  Founding-
era cases involving piracy seem to confirm the point too.  In-
jured  plaintiffs  routinely  brought  in  rem  proceedings
against  ships  involved  in  piracy  regardless  of  the  owner’s 
personal  involvement  or  liability.   See,  e.g.,  Harmony  v. 
United States, 2 How. 210, 233–234 (1844).  In fact, one of 
the earliest ATS cases involved an action against a vessel.
See  Jansen  v.  The  Vrow  Christina  Magdalena,  13  F. Cas. 
356,  358–359  (No.  7,216)  (SC  1794).    All  of  which  under-
scores  the  ATS  has  never  distinguished  between  defend-
ants. 

II 
The real problem with this lawsuit and others like it thus
isn’t whether the defendant happens to be a corporation.  To 
my mind, it’s this:  Just as the ATS nowhere privileges cor-
porations, it nowhere deputizes the Judiciary to create new
causes of action.  Rather, the statute confers “jurisdiction” 
on federal courts to adjudicate “tort” claims by aliens for vi-
olations “of the law of nations.”  Perhaps this language was 
originally understood to furnish federal courts with author-
ity  to  entertain  a  limited  number  of  specific  and  existing
intentional tort claims that, if left unremedied, could give 
rise to reprisals or war.  See Jesner, 584 U. S., at ___–___ 
(opinion of GORSUCH, J.); Bellia, 78 U. Chi. L. Rev., at 515– 
521.  Perhaps, too, the law affords federal courts jurisdic-
tion to hear any other tort claims Congress chooses to cre-
ate.  But nothing in the statute’s terse terms obviously au-
thorizes  federal  courts  to  invent  new  causes  of  action  on 
their own. 

Nor would I find such an extraordinary authority linger-
ing  latent  after  all  this  time.    This  Court  has  never—not 
once in 230 years—invoked the ATS to create a new cause