For much of U.S. history, people harmed abroad by American corporations have had few meaningful pathways into U.S. courts. Wage theft, child labor, trafficking, land grabbing, union busting – corporate impunity has long been insulated by the complexity of global supply chains. Even when the company was headquartered in the U.S., profited in the U.S., or made decisions in the U.S., the law often treated the harm as too distant, too foreign, or too complicated.
In this episode of Art of Citizenry, host Manpreet Kaur Kalra speaks with Charity Ryerson, Executive Director and Founder of Corporate Accountability Lab. Together, they examine the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a single sentence passed in 1789 that became one of the few legal pathways for people harmed by corporate impunity abroad to seek accountability in U.S. courts.
Over the past two decades, the Supreme Court has narrowed the ATS case by case. Then, in June 2026, the Court closed the door even further in Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe I, a case alleging that the U.S. tech giant helped build a surveillance system used to identify, track, detain, and torture Falun Gong practitioners in China.
This episode traces the history of the ATS and examines what its further narrowing means for corporate accountability in an era of globalization and outsourced harm. We look at how corporations use subsidiaries, suppliers, contractors, and jurisdictional complexity to deflect responsibility, and we ask what pathways remain when one of the few tools for transnational accountability is closed even further.
The origins of the Alien Tort Statute and why a single sentence from 1789 became so important to modern human rights litigation.
The Supreme Court’s gradual narrowing of the ATS (and why we shouldn’t be calling this an originalist interpretation)
What Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe I means for aiding-and-abetting liability and claims against U.S. corporations accused of enabling human rights abuses abroad.
Why aiding-and-abetting liability matters in cases where corporations may not directly commit abuses but allegedly provide the money, technology, logistics, security, or market pressure that makes those abuses possible.
The limits of the Torture Victim Protection Act, especially after Cisco, and what possibilities remain for holding individual corporate actors accountable.
Where advocates, lawmakers, communities, and movements can go from here.At its core, this is a conversation about power: who gets access to justice, whose suffering is recognized by the courts, and what happens when corporations can profit across borders while accountability stops at the border.
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