On June 29, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review an appeals court decision that permits activists to go forward with a suit claiming that a pharmaceutical company violated international law when a team of its doctors provided emergency medical aid to children in Nigeria suffering from meningitis. The decision was a setback for WLF, which filed a brief urging the Court to grant review. WLF argued that federal law does not permit private parties to file tort suits in federal court asserting that doctors violated international law by allegedly treating patients without first obtaining the patients’ informed consent. WLF urged the court to reject claims that such suits are authorized by the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a 1789 law that lay dormant for nearly 200 years before activists began seeking to invoke it in the past several decades. WLF argued that Congress intended to limit the law’s application to events taking place either in the United States or on the high seas.