What would you say are some of the highlights that really sort of formed you also?

So I did that for a long time.

Again, I was still quite young when I went to work for what was then the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

It's now called Human Rights First.

But I think I was 27.

I gave up my... law career.

I had been hired by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago, which is where I was practicing law, and went to work for an organization that basically was just getting off the ground.

But what got you to focus there and maybe what led to the formation of the center at Stern specifically?

But what is the legal mechanism by which a US federal court is hearing claims under Colombian law?

Let me make a broader point, which is sort of why I think this is most interesting.

There has been a period now of 30 years where there's been a discussion of business and human rights and a recognition that in the world in which we live, um, a globalized economy where you have giant companies based in the United States or Europe or elsewhere operating in countries where laws are weak, where there's a, what I call a governance gap, there needs to be a way to, uh, basically create some rules of the road.

So a company like Chiquita that's operating in, whether it's in Colombia or Guatemala or Ecuador, operating in countries where weak-- the law is weak and where these vi- uh, violations are occurring, there needs to be some way to provide a remedy, some way to provide accountability for bad action.

And it's happening in different ways, and there are other...

United States took an early lead on this.

There's been a backtracking in the alien tort statute.

Is there a way to, to expand that? Do you see that working, for example, specifically focused on other regions and other individuals, or is it a model for something that's much broader and would apply more globally?

And what happened around that time?

Well, one of the things that happened that I, uh, was very involved in, I worked at the time, uh, directing, um, an organization called Human Rights First, and we recruited ultimately fifty retired, uh, senior military officers, generals and admirals, who appealed to Senator McCain, John McCain, a prominent Republican, prominent former military officer himself, to, uh, challenge the Bush administration and this notion of enhanced interrogation techniques.

Turned out that the uniformed military, the most senior people in the military, regarded this as a breach of their traditional notions of discipline, of, of control, and realized that this was gonna-- going down a very bad path.

So we had a debate over years.

Some of the cases were brought to court.

This, this is one of them.

But there was also a, a piece of legislation called the Detainee Treatment Act, which did a number of things, but among them said to the US government, "You can no longer use these enhanced interrogation techniques." And, and twenty years later, even under what was...

How do you read this case and this verdict in that context and for going forward?