Like, to an extent I understand there are legal complexities here. International law is messy. Nestl has enough degrees of separation because they are only business partners with slavers, which gives them a degree of plausible deniability. By directly funding slavers as part of normal business operations they are only indirectly funding slavery, even thoughsurely it's Nestl's funding that creates this environment at all. Plus, the burden of proof to show they are aware of the slavery and child labor is probably really high. The argument seems to be the plaintiffs should be suing the slavers themselves. There's opinions on whether companies can even be sued over international law violations I won't even pretend to understand. But uh...does anyone actually believe any of this?
As a layman I can't help but read this as a total failure of the legal system. As in, the 8-1 verdict (Alito the lone dissenter?) only tells me that the law is completely unequipped to deal with the problem. And the issue in question is so heinous that's unacceptable.
The plaintiffs sued in US court for things that were done outside the US. Usually, the US lacks jurisdiction to decide such cases. I've seen Alito decline to strictly follow the letter of the law when there's something morally outrageous happening before (like the Westboro Baptist Church case) so I guess I'm not too surprised that he's the lone dissenter here.
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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013 Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!