COMMUNITY VOICES
LOS ANGELES PUBLIC INTEREST LAW JOURNAL
2 L.A. PUB. INT. L.J. 203
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THE PERILS AND PROMISE OF THE ALIEN TORT STATUTE IN PRACTICE
A Comment on The Alien Tort Statute: An Introduction for Civil Rights*
Bama Athreya & Julie Su

We offer this comment on the preceding article by Paul Hoffman and Adrienne Quarry entitled, “The Alien Tort Statute: An Introduction for Civil Rights Lawyers” (“Article”). We offer our perspective as human rights advocates from organizations that embrace a multi-pronged strategy for social change that includes
litigation as one tool. We were involved in two of the cases referenced in the Article, one of which involved the use of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) and the other of which did not. We offer some explanation for these choices, some perspectives on future application of the ATS, the context in which such cases take place, and their role in achieving broader legal and social reform.

*This is an excerpt.  To view the entire piece, please download the pdf.

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Authors

Bama Athreya is the Executive Director of the International Labor Rights Forum. Dr. Athreya joined ILRF in early 1998, just after returning from a two-year assignment in Cambodia as the AFL-CIO’s Country Representative. While in Cambodia she directed worker education and labor law training programs and conducted extensive research on women workers and child labor. She is a cultural anthropologist and received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.  She spent three years in Indonesia, first as a State Department official and later as an independent researcher, and wrote her thesis on Indonesia’s labor movement. She has also lived and worked in China, Taiwan and India.

Julie A. Su is the Director of Litigation at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center
(APALC) in Los Angeles. She has  represented low-wage workers in litigation to end sweatshops since 1994, when she graduated from Harvard Law School and joined APALC as a Skadden Fellow. Su has been widely recognized combining litigation with organizing efforts, cross-racial community building, public education and mobilization, and broad-based policy proposals to effect change.  In 2001, she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” award.