American Transitional Justice
Writing Cold War History in Human Rights Litigation

Explores how two landmark transnational human rights lawsuits operated as transitional justice mechanisms in the former Western bloc.

Natalie R. Davidson (Author)

9781108477703, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 July 2020

270 pages
15 x 23 x 1.5 cm, 0.46 kg

'To what extent has America been held accountable for its conduct abroad during the Cold War? Read this book for an insightful interdisciplinary inquiry into the pursuit of justice through human rights litigation.' Ruti Teitel, Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, New York Law School

Natalie Davidson offers an alternative account of Alien Tort Statute litigation by revisiting the field's two seminal cases, Filártiga (filed 1979) and Marcos (filed 1986), lawsuits ostensibly concerned with torture in Paraguay and the Philippines, respectively. Combining legal analysis, archival research and ethnographic methods, this book reveals how these cases operated as transitional justice mechanisms, performing the transition of the United States and its allies out of the Cold War order. It shows that US courts produced a whitewashed history of US involvement in repression in the Western bloc, while in Paraguay and the Philippines the distance from US courts allowed for a more critical narration of the lawsuits and their underlying violence as symptomatic of structural injustice. By exposing the political meanings of these legal landmarks for three societies, Davidson sheds light on the blend of hegemonic and emancipatory implications of international human rights litigation in US courts.

1. Introduction. Revisiting the Gilded Age of transnational human rights litigation in US courts
2. Alien tort statute litigation in legal practice and the legal imagination
3. 'Foreign torture, American justice': Filártiga in the United States
4. Filártiga in Paraguay
5. Narrating the Marcos regime in US courts
6. The Marcos case and transitional justice in the Philippines
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Human rights [JPVH], The Cold War [HBTW], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], General & world history [HBG]