I. INTRODUCTION

From the banana plantations of Colombia to the cocoa farms of the Ivory Coast to the natural gas fields of Indonesia, U.S.-based corporations routinely turn a blind eye to human rights violations, ranging from child slave labor to murder. With no local avenues of redress available, victims of this abuse over the past few decades have turned to the American court system to gain compensation for their losses. Typically, plaintiffs in these cases file suit under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). The ATS was passed in the Judiciary Act of 1789, and it reads, “the district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” ¹ There is ample legal debate over the original intent of the ATS, but the Supreme Court has articulated that the ATS “was intended to promote harmony in international relations by ensuring foreign plaintiffs a remedy for international-law violations in circumstances where the absence of a remedy might provoke foreign nations to hold the United States accountable.”²

After its passage in 1789, the ATS barely gained attention for nearly two centuries. However, in the 1980s, human rights activists latched onto the statute as a way of prosecuting human rights violations in domestic courts. A flood of ATS cases entered the federal court system over the next couple of decades, and many saw success. However, since the early 2000s, the Supreme Court has vastly narrowed the scope of the law. In a series of decisions, the Supreme Court imposed parameters on the ATS, asserting that only torts against domestic entities are permissible and the statute may not be applied extraterritorially. It is the latter condition that this article analyzes in depth.

That domestic laws do not apply extraterritorially is a presumption that the Supreme Court has applied across a variety of cases. Two important rulings have subjected ATS cases to this presumption: Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (2013) and Nestle v. Doe (2021). In both cases, the Supreme Court ruled that the violation of international law around which plaintiffs constructed their claim occurred abroad and therefore did not fall under the jurisdiction of the ATS. The earlier case, Kiobel, established that, to displace the presumption against extraterritoriality, a violation must “touch and concern the territory of the United States with sufficient force.”³ However, the Supreme Court’s language changed in Nestle, in which it ruled that “the conduct relevant to the statute’s focus [must have] occurred in the United States.”⁴ The Court did not provide any further information about this focus test, so the question lingers as to what constitutes such conduct. 

This article seeks to clarify Nestle’s focus test in the context of aiding and abetting liability for domestic corporations. Thus far, the Supreme Court has only ruled on what qualifies as an extraterritorial application of the ATS, but not on the content of sufficient domestic misconduct. Since Nestle, ATS cases have continued to confront the lower federal courts, and, despite several rejections, some have enjoyed initial success. Two cases from the summer of 2023 stand out in particular.⁵ In Doe I v. Cisco Systems, the Ninth Circuit reversed the district court’s dismissal of plaintiffs’ claim that Cisco aided and abetted Chinese repression of Falun Gong, a national religious movement. This case is instructive because Cisco engaged in the concrete domestic action of manufacturing a surveillance system for the Chinese government with full knowledge that it would be used to abuse the rights of Falun Gong adherents. I propose Cisco as an upper boundary of the types of cases admissible under the focus test because manufacturing materials employed in a violation of human rights is an unusually robust fulfillment of domestic aiding and abetting liability. 

I also analyze Al Shimari v. CACI Premier Technology, Inc., in which a Virginia district court rejected a military contractor’s motion to dismiss plaintiffs’ ATS claim that the company aided and abetted human rights abuses against Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. In this case, the contractor oversaw foreign operations through domestic managers in its Virginia headquarters. On multiple occasions, domestic managers became aware of Iraqi torture at the hands of CACI employees, but they refused to fire these individuals, even when the military requested that they do so. I posit that this case can serve as a lower boundary of admissible cases under the focus test because the Supreme Court ruled in Nestle that general corporate decision making was not sufficient domestic misconduct under the ATS. However, CACI clears the ruling because it alleges specific decisions made by domestic managers that directly permitted the continued commission of international law violations. Through analysis of Nestle, Cisco, and CACI, I will argue that precise, knowing acts carried out in the United States that aid the foreign commission of an international law violation pass the focus test and therefore constitute a permissible application of the ATS. 

II. LEGAL HISTORY

After an influx of ATS cases in lower federal courts throughout the 1980s and 90s, the Supreme Court first considered the statute in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain in 2004.⁶ The aspect of this case relevant to aiding and abetting liability is its qualification of what can constitute a violation of the law of nations. The plaintiff in Sosa claimed that the U.S. government hired a Mexican national to kidnap him and transport him to the United States for imprisonment due to his murder of a DEA agent. The asserted violation of international law was arbitrary arrest because the arrest warrant only applied in the U.S., not Mexico. However, the Supreme Court ruled that arbitrary arrest was not an accepted violation of international law, and claims must cite the violation of an international legal norm that is “specific, universal, and obligatory.”⁷

The next relevant Supreme Court ATS decision came almost a decade later in 2013 with Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. This case dealt with the claim that Royal Dutch Petroleum aided and abetted human rights abuses in Nigeria. The Court rejected the ATS claim because it pointed solely to breaches of international law taking place in Nigeria, violating the presumption against extraterritoriality. ⁸ The majority opinion leaned on the precedent established in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. that “[w]hen a statute gives no clear indication of an extraterritorial application, it has none.”⁹ Kiobel placed the onus on plaintiffs to prove that a violation of international law occurred in the United States. 

The most recent Supreme Court ruling on the ATS was in 2021 in the case of Nestle USA, Inc v. Doe. The plaintiffs in this case were former child slave laborers who had been trafficked from Mali to the Ivory Coast to work on cocoa farms. Nestle had an exclusive purchasing agreement with these farms, and the plaintiffs sued Nestle for aiding and abetting child slave labor, citing the training, equipment, and personal payments the corporation provided the farmers. As in Kiobel, the Supreme Court ruled that the claim was an impermissible extraterritorial application of the ATS because nearly all conduct took place in the Ivory Coast. Furthermore, the Court established the focus test detailed earlier, articulating that an ATS claim must prove that “conduct relevant to the statute’s focus occurred in the United States.”¹⁰

III. A STANDARD OF AIDING AND ABETTING LIABILITY

Before examining the acts that would satisfy the focus test, two questions must be answered. First, is aiding and abetting liability an acceptable cause of action under the ATS? Second, what are the general standards for aiding and abetting liability? I begin with the first. 

Typically, in cases of ATS corporate aiding and abetting liability, corporate defense teams attack the very notion of an international norm against aiding and abetting. However, a clear international norm exists stretching back to the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials. The UN charters creating tribunals to prosecute Nazi and Japanese war criminals both state that “leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes [crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity] are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.” ¹¹ The operative word here is “accomplice,” meaning that people who aided and abetted the crimes could be prosecuted. The language of aiding and abetting officially entered customary international law under the charters of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Just as their forebears, both charters create a similar standard whereby an individual holds criminal responsibility if they “planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation, or execution of a [war crime or crime against humanity].”¹² Given these several instances of aiding and abetting liability as recognized by the international community in the prosecution of war criminals, it is clear that a specific, universal, and obligatory norm against aiding and abetting exists, per Sosa’s requirements. 

With the norm of aiding and abetting liability established, we can turn to the proper standard of such liability. Here, there is more room for argument, as the aforementioned charters created neither a mens rea nor an actus reus for aiding and abetting, leaving the task instead to the trial courts. In past ATS litigation, courts have divided over the mens rea, which is the mental state of the abettor. Some courts abide by the strict purpose standard, which requires that conduct under aiding and abetting claims be carried out with the purpose of facilitating the commission of a crime.¹³ Others abide by a looser knowledge standard, which only requires that the abettor know of the possibility that a violation of international law may occur.¹⁴ The reason for this divide is that courts give different weight to different sources of international law. Supporters of the purpose standard defer to the Rome Statute, which holds liable individuals who “for the purpose of facilitating the commission of such a crime, aids, abets, or otherwise assists in its commission or its attempted commission.”¹⁵ Meanwhile, proponents of the knowledge standard look to case law from the ICTY and ICTR. In John Doe I v. Unocal, the Ninth Circuit turned to ICTY cases such as Prosecutor v. Furundzija and ICTR cases such as Prosecutor v. Musema to assert a general aiding and abetting standard of “knowing practical assistance, encouragement, or moral support which has a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime.”¹⁶ Faced with two seemingly valid sources of international law, from which should we draw the proper mens rea?

The appropriate mens rea of aiding and abetting is the knowledge standard. The Rome Statute is not the place to look for the mens rea because it “expressly warns against conflating its provisions with customary international law.”¹⁷ Rather, the statute articulates that it “shall [not] be interpreted as limiting or prejudicing in any way existing or developing rules of international law for purposes other than this statute.”¹⁸ The Rome Statute was created in the context of concerns over sovereignty, an atmosphere that pushed it to create “lowest common denominator definitions far more restrictive than those generally believed to be part of customary international law.”¹⁹  

The knowledge mens rea standard is the first component of aiding and abetting liability, and the second is the actus reus, which is the act that caused harm. There is broad consensus over this element, and it is defined as “assistance to the principal with substantial effect on an international law violation.”²⁰ When assessing corporate liability, the actus reus is even more important than the mens rea, so long as one accepts the knowledge standard. It is often easy to prove that a corporation knew it was facilitating international law violations, but it is a more difficult task to prove that the actus reus occurred in the United States. The next two sections zoom in on the level of domestic conduct necessary to satisfy the focus test.

IV. INSUFFICIENT DOMESTIC CONDUCT: AN ANALYSIS OF NESTLE V. DOE

In Nestle v. Doe, as described earlier, plaintiffs alleged that Nestle aided and abetted child slave labor in the Ivory Coast. Given Supreme Court precedent in Kiobel, the onus was on the plaintiffs to prove the domestic link between Nestle and the commission of the international law violation in Africa. In the petitioners’ brief, the first allegation of domestic conduct made is that “every major operational decision regarding Nestle’s U.S. business, including the sourcing and supervision of its cocoa supply chain in the Ivory Coast, is made or approved by Nestle USA’s executives in the United States.”²¹ The next allegation is that Nestle provided “plantation owners with (1) financial support, including advance payments and personal spending money … (2) farming supplies … and (3) training and capacity building.”²² Additionally, the brief claims that Nestle sent fact-finding missions to cocoa farms that would then report back to headquarters in the U.S. A final allegation the brief makes is that Nestle “spent millions of dollars to ensure the failure of legislation that would have required public disclosure of cocoa produced by child slaves.”²³

Amongst the plaintiffs’ allegations, the provision of personal payments, farming supplies, and training to cocoa farmers would be the strongest in satisfying the actus reus of aiding and abetting liability. However, the Supreme Court removed these activities from consideration because all three occurred in the Ivory Coast, making the focus of the international law violation the Ivory Coast. Of the remaining allegations, the only other relevant one is the accusation of major operational decisions being made in the United States. However, the claim lacks specificity, and the Supreme Court does not hold general corporate activity to be a valid actus reus. The remaining claims are fruitless because the fact-finding missions only point towards fulfillment of the mens rea, as they indicate knowledge of the international law violation. Also, the allegation of lobbying is a non-starter; it is far removed from the act of slaveholding and again only indicates knowledge that the company benefits from slave labor. 

Given the facts of the case, Nestle provides a model for insufficient domestic corporate conduct that fails the focus test. The only domestic act the plaintiffs assert is that Nestle makes all operational decisions at its U.S. headquarters. These vague decisions asserted by nature of organizational structure and general corporate practice prove inadequate because specific, substantial acts are necessary to establish the actus reus of aiding and abetting liability. The shortcomings of this case emphasize the need for plaintiffs to bring precise evidence that proves a strong tie between acts carried out in the United States and abuses committed abroad. 

V. Sufficient Domestic Conduct: An Analysis of Cisco

In the previous sections I defined aiding and abetting liability and the level of conduct that does not satisfy the territorial application requirement of the ATS. We can now further clarify the focus test by determining the type of domestic conduct that places the focus of aiding and abetting in the United States. Nestle closed the door to all but the strongest of ATS cases with its prohibition on general corporate activity as the actus reus of aiding and abetting. Since Nestle, two cases, Doe I v. Cisco Systems, Inc. and Al Shimari v. CACI Premier Technology, Inc., have made headway in lower federal courts. Both are informative as to the domestic conduct that implicates a corporation. I begin with discussing Cisco.

Cisco concerns an ATS claim filed by Chinese plaintiffs that Cisco Systems aided and abetted the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in violations of international law against practitioners of Falun Gong, a religious movement dedicated to truth and nonviolence. The CCP has heavily persecuted Falun Gong since its inception in the early 1990s. In 1999, China declared a douzheng, which is a campaign of violence and persecution, against Falun Gong. To facilitate the douzheng, Chinese security forces sought an online surveillance system that would identify and track Falun Gong practitioners. The security forces invited bids from foreign corporations to build the system because China lacked the requisite technology. Cisco, which is based in San Jose, California and has offices in Asia, won contracts with Chinese security and went on to develop not only high-level plans for the surveillance system but also the specific software and hardware necessary to run the system. The result was the Golden Shield, a “system that could be accessed digitally by national, provincial, and major municipal security across China.” ²⁴ Through the Golden Shield, security personnel could identify and track known and suspected practitioners of Falun Gong due to the unique ability of the system to “carefully analyze patterns of Falun Gong internet activity … enabl[ing] the intelligent identification of individual Falun Gong internet users.”²⁵ 

Once Chinese authorities identified Falun Gong practitioners through Golden Shield, they arrested them and committed a variety of human rights violations that international law expressly forbids. A common practice was zhuanhua, which is “forced conversion through torture.”²⁶ During torture sessions, officials often taunted prisoners with private information obtained through the Golden Shield. Other victims of the douzheng were sent to labor camps. Either way, “the physical torture the plaintiffs endured in detention and while imprisoned in forced labor camps included beatings with steel rods and shocking with electric batons, sleep deprivation, … violent force-feeding” and a variety of other brutalities.²⁷ Despite the clear nexus between Cisco’s development of the Golden Shield and Chinese human rights abuses against Falun Gong, a district court initially denied hearing of the case due to the presumption against extraterritoriality. Last summer, the Ninth Circuit overturned the court’s dismissal. The Ninth Circuit’s reasoning proves instructive in determining the type of corporate domestic conduct necessary to sustain an ATS claim. 

The Ninth Circuit held that Cisco overcame the mens rea standard of aiding and abetting liability. The court used a knowledge standard and established that there was sufficient evidence that Cisco knew its technology would be used to violate human rights. Specifically, Chinese officials told Cisco during the bidding process that it was “primarily concerned with whether the [Golden Shield] could eliminate Falun Gong adherents and activity.”²⁸ Moreover, Cisco’s internal reports “repeatedly mention[ed] the connection between Cisco’s technological assistance and the crackdown on … Falun Gong adherents.”²⁹ The plaintiffs provided even more evidence than the preceding two pieces, and the result is that Cisco clears the knowledge mens rea standard of aiding and abetting.

In terms of the tougher actus reus standard of aiding and abetting, Cisco also clears the bar. From earlier discussion, it is already evident that Cisco furnished China with substantial assistance in the violation of international law. However, the true question is whether the focus of this conduct was in the United States. The Cisco plaintiffs provide three convincing strains of evidence to the affirmative. The first entails the high-level design of the Golden Shield system. This design process took place entirely in San Jose, “the sole location where Cisco cutting edge integrated systems were researched and developed.”³⁰ Beyond the design, “Cisco manufactured key components of the Golden Shield in the United States, such as Integrated circuit chips that function in the same manner as the Central Processing Unit of a computer.”³¹ Finally, Cisco provided China with continual product support and updates from its San Jose headquarters. Each of these acts in the United States were essential to Chinese repression of Falun Gong across the Pacific. The lack of any one element would have severely undermined or prevented the douzheng. 

The substantial corporate domestic conduct present in Cisco far outstrips the generic decision making alleged in Nestle. The specific acts of design, manufacture, and product support in San Jose directly aided the commission of human rights abuses in China, while vague decision making is only secondary to the act of aiding and abetting abuse. These acts clearly place the focus of Cisco’s aiding and abetting in the United States. 

VI. A More Complex Case: An Analysis of CACI

The facts of Cisco are quite extraordinary, and it is likely the strongest possible case to be made for a domestic focus of aiding and abetting liability. I will now investigate Al Shimari v. CACI Premier Tech, Inc., another ATS case that has been allowed to proceed post-Nestle, but whose domestic conduct is less tangible compared to Cisco.

In the summer of 2023, a federal district court in Virginia denied CACI’s motion to dismiss Al Shimari v. CACI Premier Tech, Inc., an ATS case in which Iraqi plaintiffs claim that CACI aided and abetted violations of international law in Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War. The rejection of the motion to dismiss is significant because the court determined that, upon initial review of the evidence, plaintiffs asserted a valid application of the ATS, even in terms of the focus test. CACI is a government contractor that provides solutions across a variety of industries. In this case, CACI closed an agreement with the Department of the Interior to provide interrogation services to the U.S. Army. CACI hired, trained, and supervised the interrogators. While the interrogators were in Iraq, they participated in the abuse of prisoners, which included “violent beatings, stress positions, sleep and sensory deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, forcible removal of clothing and forced nudity, sexual assault, humiliation, electric shocks, and threats from dogs and firearms.”³²

Unlike Cisco, the CACI court has not yet, as of writing, examined the mens rea and actus reus standards of aiding and abetting liability because it has not yet formally heard the case. However, conclusions on these standards can be drawn from the court’s discussion of the jurisdiction of the ATS as it pertains to this case. The mens rea standard, per usual, is quite easy to prove in CACI. The plaintiffs assert that CACI’s reporting structure kept the Virginia offices in the loop. CACI managers on the ground in Abu Ghraib had frequent contact with the managers in Virginia. Furthermore, a CACI interrogator emailed one of the Virginia-based program managers to tender his resignation, citing general “concerns regarding the handling of prisoners and interrogation methods used.”³³ This evidence, bolstered by further evidence offered by the plaintiffs, points to CACI at the very least knowing that its interrogation team was engaging in abuse. Thus, the case passes the mens rea standard, and the rigorous actus reus standard can now be addressed. 

The plaintiffs in CACI allege specific conduct in CACI’s corporate Virginia-based offices that provides substantial assistance to the abuses committed by the interrogation team in Abu Ghraib. One piece of evidence is the same as that which established the mens rea. When the CACI interrogator emailed the Virginia-based manager to resign and make claims of abuse in Abu Ghraib, the manager took no action to verify the allegations by contacting on-site managers in Abu Ghraib nor to inform the military of the potential abuse taking place. The plaintiffs also present evidence of communication between “CACI’s in-country manager in Iraq and CACI’s United States-based leadership about how to respond to a photograph depicting CACI interrogator Johnson with a detainee in a stress position.”³⁴ The military had seen the photograph and requested that Johnson be fired. However, CACI’s Executive Vice President refused the request. On top of this evidence, the court’s dismissal alludes to other evidence presented in the complaint that furthers the allegation that CACI’s corporate offices knew of the abuses occurring yet took no action to address them. 

In the motion to dismiss, CACI painted its domestic acts as the general corporate activity that Nestle found insufficient. However, the district court makes an important distinction in its dismissal. The court emphasizes that general corporate activity means “activities that are ‘common to most corporations and otherwise unconnected to the asserted ATS claims.”³⁵ Meanwhile, the “the Supreme Court did not categorically exclude all ‘authorized business conduct.’”³⁶ Therefore, the conduct in CACI cannot be dismissed as general corporate activity because the plaintiffs make specific allegations as to how the decisions made in the United States pointedly and substantially assisted human rights abuses in Abu Ghraib. These specific decisions are twofold. First, CACI managers in the U.S. refused to address news of abuse coming from the ground in Iraq. Second, CACI leadership refused to fire an interrogator whom photo evidence captured committing a human rights violation against an Iraqi detainee. These acts constitute substantial assistance because CACI’s inaction on abuse allegations and refusal to fire a proven violator allowed the crimes to continue unhindered in Iraq, placing the focus of aiding and abetting firmly in CACI’s Virginia offices.  

Cisco and CACI provide a roadmap for post-Nestle ATS cases by outlining the conduct necessary to establish the domestic focus of corporate aiding and abetting. From the preceding analysis, we can see that vague allegations of corporate activity, like those presented in Nestle, will fail. Meanwhile, cases that can prove specific domestic conduct that was substantial or indispensable in the commission of an international law violation abroad will enjoy success. 

VII. Conclusion

The scope of the ATS post-Nestle is a fraction of the scope established in the early ATS cases of the 1980s. Plaintiffs must jump through the hoops of providing a valid cause of action, suing only a domestic actor, and proving a sufficient connection to U.S. territory. This article has sought to clarify this final component. A close analysis of Nestle revealed that the true acts of aiding and abetting took place in the Ivory Coast, while the domestic act of general decision making lacked the necessary specificity to tie the act to the crime. A subsequent analysis of Cisco and CACI was instructive in determining the level of domestic corporate conduct that constitutes the actus reus of aiding and abetting liability. In the former case, the design, hardware manufacturing, and software updates with which CISCO’s corporate offices in San Jose furnished the CCP satisfied the actus reus because the domestic acts were instrumental in crafting a surveillance system that the CCP used to torture and “reeducate” practitioners of Falun Gong. In the latter case, CACI’s refusal to investigate allegations of human rights violations and to fire an interrogator proven complicit in the torture of a detainee meets the actus reus standard because both were specific acts that directly allowed violations in Abu Ghraib to continue. When compared, these analyses provide a better understanding of the focus test, which the Supreme Court failed to clarify in Nestle. For a case to pass the focus test, it must prove that specific corporate conduct in the United States directly and substantially assisted international law violations abroad. The major upshot of this article is that Nestle’s focus test has set the bar extremely high for ATS cases. Just a slim band of cases will make it over.

1. Stephen Mulligan, The Alien Tort Statute: A Primer, 25 (2022), https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R44947.pdf (last visited Apr 12, 2024).
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2. Jesner v. Arab Bank, PLC, 584 U.S. 241, 243, 138 S. Ct. 1386, 1390, 200 L. Ed. 2d 612 (2018).
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3. Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 569 U.S. 108, 127, 133 S. Ct. 1659, 1670, 185 L. Ed. 2d 671 (2013).
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4. Nestle USA, Inc. v. Doe, 593 U.S. 628, 628–29, 141 S. Ct. 1931, 1933, 210 L. Ed. 2d 207 (2021).
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5. Susan Farbstein, A Good Summer for Human Rights Cases in U.S. Courts: Alien Tort Statute Update, Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic (2023), https://humanrightsclinic.law.harvard.edu/a-good-summer-for-human-rights-cases-in-u-s-courts-alien-tort-statute-update/ (last visited Apr 13, 2024).
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6. Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 542 U.S. 692, 732, 124 S. Ct. 2739, 2766, 159 L. Ed. 2d 718 (2004)
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7.  Sosa
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8.  Kiobel, 569 U.S. at 124.
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9. Morrison v. Nat’l Australia Bank Ltd., 561 U.S. 247, 130 S. Ct. 2869, 2873, 177 L. Ed. 2d 535 (2010).
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10.  Nestlé, 593 U.S. at 628-629.
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11.  Charter of the International Military Tribunal art. 6, August 8, 1945. ↩︎
12. Updated Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia art. 7, May 25, 1993.
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13. Presbyterian Church Of Sudan v. Talisman Energy, Inc., 582 F.3d 244, 259 (2d Cir. 2009). ↩︎
14.  Doe I v. Unocal Corp., 395 F.3d 932, 950–51 (9th Cir. 2002).
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15. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court art. 25, July 17, 1998.
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16. Unocal, 395 F.3d at 950–51.
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17. Doe I v. Cisco Sys., Inc., 73 F.4th 700, 711 (9th Cir. 2023).
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18. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court art. 10.
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19. Leila Nadya Sadat, Custom, Codification and Some Thoughts about the Relationship between the Two: Article 10 of the ICC Statute, 49 DEPAUL L. REV. 909 (2000).
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20. Cisco, 73 F.4th at 711.
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21. Paul L Hoffman et al., On Writs of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit BRIEF OF RESPONDENTS IN 19-416.
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22.  Id.
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23.  Id.
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24.  Cisco, 73 F.4th at 711.
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25.  Id.
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26.  Id.
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27.  Id. at 712.
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28.  Id. at 734.
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29.   Id.
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30. Id. at 738.
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31.  Id. at 711. 
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32.  Al Shimari v. CACI Premier Tech., Inc., No. 108CV827LMBJFA, 2023 WL 5181611, at 2 (E.D. Va. July 31, 2023).
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33.  Id. at 12. ↩︎
34. Id. at 13.
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35.  Id. at 11.
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36.  Id.
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