Justine, a petition for rehearing en banc was denied, but I do not know whether the heirs will seek review in the Supreme Court.

Thanks for the comments, Kotodama. I think you’re right to suggest that there is a value to repose that we need to take into account. But the bigger issue here is one of legitimacy. You say, what’s so bad about a French court awarding damages to Native Americans on account of historical injustices they suffered here? I suggest in the post that reparations in favor of an American citizen against an American defendant on account of something that happened long ago in America really is none of France’s business. People complain about imperialism all the time. Isn’t a court judging some wrong committed abroad by one foreign national against another a kind of judicial imperialism?

I agree with you about this, and I wrote about it in my post on Phillpp:

“If I may conclude with a non-legal point, I do not like the way Chief Justice Roberts began his opinion. He traced the history of the treasure through the centuries in Brunswick Cathedral, then a Hanoverian chapel, and then safekeeping in Switzerland before its purchase, during the Weimar period, by a Jewish consortium, which sold off part of the collection before the Nazis acquired it; after the war, the United States seized the treasure and eventually returned it to the German government, which put it on display in a German museum. I am sure it was not intended, but to me the recitation of the long history in cathedrals and chapters, followed by a sale to, well, a bunch of Weimar Jews interested in profiting from the collection, followed later by the return of the treasure to a museum, plays to antisemitic stereotypes. Maybe I am being overly sensitive, but that is the impression I had after reading the beginning of the decision. As I say, I am sure it was unintentional, but I feel there was a better way to approach the story.”

That said, while I don’t consider my primary domicile to be in the human rights world, I’m also not sure I see what’s so terrible about the examples you give in the next-to-last paragraph. Why is it so awful that people might get redress, no matter how insanely delayed, for injustices committed against them? Isn’t the horrible outcome the opposite of that—where no redress is ever forthcoming?

Maybe, as you seem to imply, there ought to be some sort of statute of limitations or repose. Even if so, that would seem to be a separate issue from whether the outcome is good on the merits.

I also don’t get the complaint about it being a French judge, or even a Chinese one. (Not that, realistically, a Chinese court is ever going to do something like that.) For one, the country that committed the wrongdoing in the first place is hardly going to be eager to set up a system where it can be liable in its own courts.

Second, and more importantly, these are supposed to be universal human rights, aren’t they? As long as you accept that concept that they’re universal—and maybe you don’t, which is fine I guess—then by definition it doesn’t seem odd to be agnostic about the particular jurisdiction where such rights are vindicated. If they’re not in fact universal, then I guess they’re not human rights either, since “human” rights should presumably be the same for all humans wherever located. And, similarly, a right that exists in theory but can’t actually be vindicated anywhere in practice seems like it might as well not exist at all.

Again, if you deny the very concept of human rights or that they’re meant to be universal, that’s all well and good. But if you at least accept that much, I don’t see what the problem is.

PS: (1) As an aesthetic (?) suggestion for the blog, it might be good to indicate the date for each post—I don’t seem to see that anywhere at least following the reboot; and (2) I suspect after submitting this comment the issue with no line spacing between paragraphs is still going to be present—if so, can I plead with you to do something about that?