Over 35 years ago Judge Henry Friendly famously called the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) “a kind of legal Lohengrin … no one seems to know whence it came.” Whether that was true then, it’s not true now: there is wide scholarly consensus that its purpose was to provide a remedy for international wrongs for which the United States would be held responsible by foreign nations. Examples included assaults on and interference with foreign diplomats within the United States, and attacks by U.S. citizens on ships and property of nations with which the United States was not at war. Kiobel-type claims, involving the actions of non-U.S. citizens in foreign countries with no connection to the United States, are far from (and indeed contradict) the purposes for which the ATS was adopted.