The Supreme Court’s Era of Meaningless Rights

The six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have made one thing clear: People may have rights, but in many cases they have no way to enforce them. Four decisions released this week have that paradox at their core.Two of them, both issued Tuesday, held that the plaintiffs lacked “causes of action”—the legal authorization to sue to vindicate their federal rights. In Cisco v. DOE, practitioners of the Falun Gong religion claimed that they were persecuted by the Chinese government and that Cisco’s surveillance technology helped China identify and torture them. The six Republican appointees said the victims could not sue Cisco under the Alien Tort Statute, a law enacted in 1789 that allows “any civil action by an alien for a tort” that is “committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” In another case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, a Rastafarian prisoner had attempted to sue the correctional officers who had forcibly held him down and shaved his dreadlocks—in violation of his religious practices—after he had handed them a judicial decision telling them they could not do so. Here the six Republican appointees said that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act does not allow people to bring claims for money damages against the individual correctional officers who are subject to the act’s obligations.In both of these cases, the majority ruled expansively, issuing sweeping legal proclamations that will have serious consequences for people whose rights are violated. In Cisco, the justices didn’t just say that Falun Gong practitioners couldn’t sue a corporation for enabling their torture. They said that courts could not recognize any causes of action under the Alien Tort Statute for violations of the law of nations that did not exist when the statute was enacted in 1789. It is up to Congress to authorize causes of action for newly recognized features of the law of nations, even though Congress had already