AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL LAW CASES Fourth Series 2009 VOLUME 1

Book excerpt: AILC is an annual case law reporter that provides the full text of U.S. court opinions involving international law issues. The courts covered include all U.S. federal district courts, federal appellate courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as some state courts, the U.S. Court of Claims, the U.S. Court of International Trade, and the U.S. Tax Court. The series seeks to provide not every single case in which a court refers to international law but rather all cases that analyze at least one international law issue in depth. The list of subjects addressed by these volumes is vast and changes from year to year, with the inclusion and prominence of most topics turning on their prevalence in a given year's jurisprudence. Some consistently prominent topics are personal jurisdiction over foreign defendants, deportation procedure, and double taxation. Over the last three editions (2006, 2007, and 2008), many topics have developed rapidly and constitute a correspondingly larger portion of the volumes, particularly Terrorism, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, Forum Non Conveniens, and an entirely new, added topic: the National Security Exception (to deportation eligibility). The 2008 edition of AILC also features expanded sections on family law and on the detention of terrorist suspects. The U.S. war on terror and the crisis at Guantanamo have made that last topic a significant and dynamic component of AILC. Each edition of AILC also comes framed with two practical resources for students and scholars. The first is an introductory editor's note that both reviews international law's major developments for the given year and explains to readers how to use the volumes. The second is a subject index to allow for targeted research. Volume One of AILC consists of cases involving international law in general and territories, trusteeships, boundaries and navigable waters. For example, in Abdullahi v. Pfizer, Inc., the Plaintiff-Appellants sued under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), claiming defendants violated a customary international law norm prohibiting involuntary medical experimentation on humans. Among other rulings, the appellate court ruled that the district court incorrectly determined that the prohibition in customary international law against nonconsensual human medical experimentation cannot be enforced through the ATS, and reversed and remanded for further proceedings. In Cunzhu Zheng v. Yahoo! Inc., the plaintiffs alleged that Yahoo! China disclosed to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) specific personal information about plaintiffs, and that, as a result of the disclosures, plaintiffs were subjected by the PRC to serious injuries and serious economic damages. The court examined whether the Electronic Communications Privacy Act applies outside the United States and ruled that it did not.