Is MBS Entitled to Head of State Immunity?
Editor’s Note: This article also appears in Just Security. In 2018, Saudi security agents brutally murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) approved the operation. In 2020, Khashoggi’s widow and a non-profit organization that he helped found sued MBS and…
Continue ReadingNo Immunity for Diplomats Who Hold Domestic Workers in Conditions of Modern Slavery
The U.K. Supreme Court issued an important decision last week in Basfar v. Wong. The Court held that a diplomat who allegedly kept a domestic employee in conditions of modern slavery was not immune from suit because the alleged conduct brought the suit within the commercial activity exception to immunity under the Vienna Convention on…
Continue ReadingWhen Should Federal Common Law Govern Transnational Litigation?
The conventional wisdom is that transnational litigation “can trigger foreign relations concerns.” Because the federal government has primary responsibility for the United States’ relations with other nations, the question naturally arises whether federal law should govern such litigation even when neither a federal statute, nor the U.S. Constitution, nor a treaty is applicable. Currently, as…
Continue ReadingA Primer on State Law in Transnational Litigation
The procedural and substantive rules that U.S. courts apply in transnational litigation come from many sources, including the U.S. Constitution, international treaties, customary international law, federal statutes, federal rules, and federal common law (both preemptive and non-preemptive)—but also, state statutes, state rules, and state common law. This primer focuses on the underappreciated role of state…
Continue ReadingA Primer on Foreign Official Immunity
Foreign official immunity refers to rules of international and domestic law that shield foreign officials from suit and from criminal prosecution. These rules are related to the rules of foreign sovereign immunity, codified in the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), but they differ from those rules in many respects. Rules of foreign official immunity…
Continue ReadingCan Corporations Claim Foreign Official Immunity?
In a recent cert petition, the Israeli company NSO Group asks the Supreme Court to consider whether corporations are entitled to conduct-based immunity when they act as agents of foreign governments. The Ninth Circuit answered no to that question, reasoning that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) comprehensively covers the immunity of corporations like NSO….
Continue ReadingCustomary International Law’s Domestic Status: Reflections After Twenty-Five Years
We are grateful to Bill Dodge for highlighting our 1997 article on the domestic legal status of customary international law. In that article, we critically analyzed what we referred to as the “modern position,” which is the claim made by some academics and the Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law that customary international law has…
Continue ReadingThrowback Thursday: Revisiting Bradley and Goldsmith’s “Critique of the Modern Position”
Twenty-five years ago, Professors Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith shook the fields of transnational litigation, federal courts, and foreign relations law by questioning the conventional wisdom that customary international law has the status of federal common law. Their article Customary International Law as Federal Common Law: A Critique of the Modern Position, published in the…
Continue ReadingForeign Dictators in U.S. Courts
From Augusto Pinochet to Jiang Zemin and Ferdinand Marcos, foreign dictators have for decades faced a range of claims in U.S. courts. But there is also a line of cases in U.S. courts involving dictators as plaintiffs. Over the last decade, authoritarian governments from China, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela have used the U.S. judicial system to file frivolous claims against political opponents. And these claims appear to be mainly a harassment technique against dissidents and media outlets based in the United States.
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