Comments on Supreme Court's decision to expand arguments in Kiobel

On Monday I reported that the Supreme Court decided to expand the discussion of Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum beyond the issue originally presented by the case (whether corporations can be sued under the Alien Tort Statute) to include the issue of extraterritoriality (whether the ATS can be applied to conduct that occurs outside the US).  The decision generated some commentary in the past couple of days.  Here is a summary taken from the SCotUS blog:

Greg Stohr of Bloomberg has coverage, as do Nina Totenberg at NPR’s The Two-Way blog, Mike Sacks of the Huffington Post, Robert Barnes of the Washington Post, Adam Liptak of the New York Times, Mark Sherman of the Associated Press, James Vicini of Reuters, Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal (via the Blog of Legal Times), Nicole Flatow of ACSblog, Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), and Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST. And in a post published at the Huffington Post before the reargument order was issued, Katie Redford responded to post-argument news reports suggesting that the Court was likely to rule in favor of corporations.  Rick Hasen at the Election Law Blog sees the “fingerprints of Justice Alito all over the” reargument order, while at the Volokh Conspiracy Kenneth Anderson lists some of the questions that he wishes were before the Justices.  And in her column at Thomson Thompson Reuters News and Insight, Alison Frankel notes that the “recasting of Kiobel has the potential to devastate U.S. human rights litigation based on overseas conduct.”