American Transitional Justice

Writing Cold War History in Human Rights Litigation

Natalie R. Davidson

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781108477703
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108804790
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 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
• Appendix 1 Key Dates in Filártiga
• Appendix 2 Key Dates in Marcos
• Bibliography
• Index