Peter Raven-Hansen, Glen Earl Weston Research Professor of Law and Co-Director of the National Security and U.S. Foreign Relations Law Program, has spent years representing victims of terrorism in civil litigation brought under the Anti-Terrorism Act. Along with Gary Osen, JD '92, he is currently working on several cases against organizations that handle financial transactions linked to terrorist activities.
In one case filed more than a decade ago, a jury found Arab Bank liable this September for materially supporting Hamas in 24 bombings that injured U.S. citizens during the second Palestinian intifada. This verdict marked the first time a bank has been held liable under a broad anti-terrorism law. Professor Raven-Hansen answered a series of questions about his work on that case and others currently pending against international banks and companies.
Q: Why is it important to pursue the organizations handling the financial transactions for terrorist groups?
The Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) gave Americans who are injured by acts of international terrorism the right to sue for treble damages. If that meant that they could sue only the terrorists themselves, it was an empty promise—terrorists die in the attack or escape. But Congress also said that by imposing liability “at any point along the causal chain of terrorism, [the ATA civil action] would interrupt, or at least imperil, the flow of money.” Banks will think twice about providing financial services to terrorist organizations if they can be held civilly liable for doing so.
Q: How did you become involved? What was your role in developing the cases?
I stayed friends with my former student and research assistant, Gary Osen, since he graduated from the law school in 1992. Gary represents victims of terrorist attacks, and in 2002 he and I speculated about legal theories by which we could hold financiers of terrorism accountable. The ATA civil remedy was then still new and the only reported case had already gone up to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals twice. Based on our work, Gary filed an ATA case against Arab Bank in 2004. I argued and helped Gary brief our opposition to the Bank’s motion to dismiss, as well as subsequent discovery motions involving the Bank’s claims of foreign bank secrecy and its interlocutory appeal to the Second Circuit. I did the same in several other ATA cases Gary filed, including an action on behalf of families of missionaries kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Colombia. Working with other plaintiffs’ lawyers, we have since helped develop the legal framework for ATA liability, including the elements of secondary liability, scienter, and causation.
Q: What are the next steps?
Our clients recently won the first jury verdict in an ATA case against a bank for knowingly financing a foreign terrorist organization. That verdict held the Arab Bank liable; a second jury will ultimately decide damages. Arab Bank has announced that it will appeal the liability verdict to the Second Circuit (which has twice before declined to hear its interlocutory appeals). The same day that the jury returned its verdict, we won an appeal to the Second Circuit that I argued earlier this year to overturn a grant of summary judgment to another bank in an ATA suit. The Court of Appeals established that a Bank is liable if it knows or is deliberately indifferent to the fact that its customer is collecting money for a foreign terrorist organization, and also held that a foreign government’s benign view of such an organization does not give a bank a safe harbor from liability under the expressly extraterritorial ATA. That case is therefore also back in the district court for further proceedings.
Q: Will these cases make their way into your teaching?
They already have. I teach a class and have a chapter on “Suing Terrorists and Their Supporters” in Counterterrorism Law. But the decade-long litigation has also raised almost the entire litany of civil procedure questions, from personal jurisdiction, forum non conveniens, discovery sanctions, and summary judgment, to interlocutory appeals, to name but a few. So my Civil Procedure students have had a real-time exposure to many of the issues we study and, recently, were as much part of the jury watch (waiting for the verdict) as I was. That said, even though these benefits for my teaching and scholarship are valuable by-products of the litigation, they are not why I got involved. My primary goal was and remains to win relief for American victims of terrorism and their families.