This chapter explores how the US court judgments and narratives in the Marcos case were mobilized in the Philippines. In the decade following the judgment on liability, victim organizations, elected officials, and the leftist press used the judgment to clarify the historical record and provide evidence of the extent of abuses under Marcos.In addition, when discussing the case, two leading Philippine newspapers offered a narrative about the Marcos regime much more challenging to both the US and to Filipino elites than that offered in US courts. The chapter also explores post-liability proceedings, and their conflict with the Philippine Republic’s policy of agrarian reform in the post-Marcos era. This conflict was resolved in 2013 through the enactment of a law providing reparations and recognition to victims of the Martial Law regime. Though the reparations law was initially conceived as a way to enforce the ATS judgment and was accordingly limited to narrow categories of abuse, following parliamentary debates its scope was extended to cover a broader range of victims whose stories are being recorded for the first time. In addition, the reparations legislation has triggered and strengthened various governmental and nongovernmental memory and official history projects. The chapter thus traces how in the move from the United States to the Philippines the meaning of the lawsuit was transformed to produce richer public narratives of repression under Marcos.

This chapter presents the book's argument that the early Alien Tort Statute cases filed in US courts in the 1970s and 1980s constitute American transitional justice in two senses: first, a legal mechanism enacting the transition of the United States and its former allies out of the Cold War order; and second, an approach to transitional justice drawing on the US tradition of privatizing public interest litigation. It distinguishes Alien Tort Litigation from other legal mechanisms in the United States, which scholars have interpreted as transitional justice conducted under other names, and situates Alien Tort litigation in the literature on the Cold War in US courts, the history of human rights, the study of law's historical narratives, critical approaches to human rights, and the sociology of human rights.

This chapter recounts the Marcos case, in which an American jury held Ferdinand Marcos’ estate liable for torture, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing and awarded a class of 10,000 plaintiffs close to two billion dollars in damages. The case has been applauded as a victory of the rule of law over arbitrary power, and a sign of the United States’ commitment to international human rights.This chapter offers a different view of the relationship between abuses under Marcos on the one hand, and law and the United States on the other. In Marcos, the chapter shows, because the lawsuit took the form of a class action against a former head of state, the human rights violations were presented by both plaintiffs and court as systematic policy, in contrast to the US courts’ individualized portrayal of violence in Filártiga. Yet the historical narrative produced by the courts was nonetheless highly distorted, as it whitewashed two key structural foundations of repression under Marcos: US support for the regime, as well as the regime’s extensive use of legal discourse to legitimate and implement repressive policies.

This chapter presents the dominant account of Alien Tort Statute litigation, which the remainder of the book challenges, providing at the same time some legal background necessary to understanding the book’s analysis. It outlines the development of human rights litigation under the statute, the law, and practice of such litigation, and the dominant terms of the scholarly and policy debate surrounding this form of litigation. It explains that the debate has pit human rights advocates seeking to promote international norms and human rights accountability beyond borders against conservatives seeking to avoid judicial interference in foreign policy. It highlights the assumptions and blind spots in that debate, in particular the striking indifference to the meaning of the litigation for the societies in which the litigated abuses occurred, at the same time as the United States itself has been viewed as disconnected from the litigated violence.