The era of the United States caring about human rights in other countries is officially over.

B Opinion Noah Feldman Legal columnist and Harvard Law Professor The era of the United States caring about human rights in other countries is officially over and the Supreme Court made that clear today. In a 6-3 decision along the usual ideological lines the court closed the door to lawsuits under the Alien Tort Statute which is an old law that enables non-US citizens to sue in US courts for violations of human rights that take place outside of the United States. That decision reversed a 20-year-old precedent an opinion written by Justice David Souter whom I clerked for. Under precedent, it was hard to bring such a human rights lawsuit but most important, it wasn't impossible. That is the United States recognized that our court should under some circumstances be a forum for considering whether human rights have been egregiously violated. Under the court's new ruling there are literally zero circumstances where you can get into US court to allege a human rights violation taking place in another country. The case involved an allegation that Cisco Systems had built for the Chinese Communist Party the computer system that surveilled investigated and ultimately lead to the arrest and torture of members of the Falun Gong religious movement. Lawsuits like that have always had the objective of naming and shaming human rights violators and potentially deterring corporations from actually cooperating with torturing countries. Justice Scalia long had the view that the United States courts should not be a forum for considering human rights claims. And today's opinion written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett who clerked for Justice Scalia decided things in the way that Scalia would have wanted. The technical details don't matter too much but the key point is that the court said that anytime the courts might get involved in determining a human rights claim of this kind it's going to necessarily implicate our national foreign policy interests. Foreign policy is the job of Congress and the president said the Supreme Court. So the courts shouldn't get involved with it. We're living in an era where the president has no qualms about violating international law invading countries assassinating leaders just to name a few. What today's decision signals is that the courts are basically OK with the same approach to human rights that the Trump administration is involved in namely not our problem not our business not something we care about. Things weren't always this way. Whether you like neo-conservatives or hate neo-conservatives they agreed with liberal internationalists that human rights actually matter and part of the job of the United States is to stand up in the world and protect those human rights. Cases in court under this statute were one way of vindicating human rights internationally here in the United States and they're over now. Conservatives like Justice Scalia long believed that courts should stay out of all kinds of matters and particularly matters involving international affairs. So the decision is consistent with that. But what's changed is that the conservative movement as a whole now just isn't even interested in the fig leaf of the idea that human rights should be a relevant consideration. This decision won't make a lot of headlines but the truth is that it should. It's a sign of the times and it's a sign of the decline in the Supreme Court's willingness to take on matters that really matter fundamentally to the rule of law domestically and in the world.