In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: William S. Dodge

13 Mar

[William S. Dodge is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. He is the co-editor (with David L. Sloss and Michael D. Ramsey) of International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change (2011).] One of the many virtues of Professor Curtis Bradley’s new book International Law in the U.S. Legal System is that it presents both sides of the arguments. That is certainly true of the chapters addressing customary international law. For example, Curt and I have differed in the past over whether customary international law is part of the “Laws of the United States” under Article III of the Constitution, so that Congress may, if it wishes, grant the federal courts subject matter jurisdiction over suits arising under customary international law. But he points readers to my argument that customary international law does fall within Article III, while of course giving his own view that it does not (pp. 141-42, 199-200). Sometimes, however, a subtle slant can sneak into the way an issue is framed. In Chapter 5, Curt tells the by now familiar story that customary international law was understood at the framing to be part of general common law (pp. 142-46), that the Supreme Court’s 1938 decision in Erie Railroad v. Tompkins destabilized the situation by ending the general common law regime (pp. 146-47), and that Sabbatino, Filartiga, and the Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law supported the possibility of customary international law as federal common law (pp. 147-52), before laying out his challenges to “the federal common law claim” (p. 155). He points out that if customary international law were federal common law for Article III purposes (as Filartiga held), then it might also preempt inconsistent state law under the Supremacy Clause of Article VI and bind the President under the Take Care Clause in Article II (pp. 152-54). “It is not clear,” he writes, “what federal law source exists for the wholesale incorporation of CIL into federal common law” (p. 156).
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08 Mar

[William S. Dodge is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. From August 2011 to July 2012, he served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked on the amicus brief of the United States to the Fourth Circuit in Yousuf v. Samantar. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the State Department or of the United States.] On Monday, Mohamed Ali Samantar filed a cert petition asking the Supreme Court to review the Fourth Circuit’s decision that he is not entitled to conduct-based immunity in a suit brought under the Alien Tort Statute and Torture Victim Protection Act alleging torture, arbitrary detention, and extrajudicial killing. In 2010, the Supreme Court held in Samantar v. Yousuf that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) did not apply to the immunities of foreign officials, which continue to be governed by federal common law. On remand, the State Department determined that Samantar did not enjoy immunity, the District Court followed the State Department’s determination, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. The Fourth Circuit held: (1) that while State Department determinations of status-based immunity (e.g. head-of-state immunity) are entitled to absolute deference, State Department determinations of conduct-based immunity for official acts are entitled only to substantial weight; and (2) that foreign officials are not entitled to conduct-based immunity for violations of jus cogens norms. I have previously explained why I believe that decision to be fundamentally correct. Samantar’s cert petition argues that the Fourth Circuit’s decision conflicts with the decisions of the Second Circuit in Matar v. Dichter, the D.C. Circuit in Belhas v. Ya’alon, and the Seventh Circuit in Ye v. Zemin, each of which refused to recognize a jus cogens exception to the immunity at issue. In Matar, the Second Circuit deferred to the State Department’s determination that the defendant was entitled to conduct-based immunity and refused to override that determination by finding a jus cogens exception. But in Samantar, the State Department has determined that the defendant is not entitled to conduct-based immunity, so the question whether to recognize a jus cogens exception was never presented. Belhas was decided on the assumption—now corrected by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Samantar decision—that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) governed the immunity of foreign officials and held that there is no jus cogens exception to the FSIA, a conclusion that prior decisions had reached in suits against states. Ye held that there was no jus cogens exception to head-of-state immunity, an immunity that attaches because of an official’s status as a sitting head of state. In each of these cases, the question was whether to recognize an exception to an immunity that had—for one reason or another—already attached. The question in Samantar, by contrast, is not whether to recognize a jus cogens exception to an immunity that has already attached, but the antecedent question whether jus cogens violations can be taken in an official capacity so that conduct-based immunity attaches in the first place. As Judge Stephen Williams noted in his concurring opinion in Belhas, the question whether an immunity attaches is “quite distinct” from the question whether to recognize exceptions to an existing immunity. The Fourth Circuit’s decision in Samantar is the first Court of Appeals decision to say whether jus cogens violations can constitute official acts for purposes of conduct-based immunity. My friend Curt Bradley has suggested that distinguishing these two questions is just semantics. To see why it is not, it may be useful to step back and consider how immunity generally works. All immunity questions proceed in three basic steps: (1) who is covered, (2) what is covered, and (3) is there an exception. I will use state immunity, status-based immunity, and conduct-based immunity as illustrations, but one could ask the same questions with respect to diplomatic and consular immunities.
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07 Jan

[William S. Dodge is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. From August 2011 to July 2012, he served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked on immunity matters. The views expressed here are his own and do not...

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03 Nov

[William S. Dodge is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. From August 2011 to July 2012, he served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked on the amicus brief of the United States to the Fourth Circuit...

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26 Jul

The joy of this project was making the kind of discovery Roger Alford recounts in his post. Alford’s chapter on international law as interpretive tool from 1901 to 1945 discusses, among other things, the Supreme Court’s various approaches to the extraterritorial reach of statutes during that period. Among these approaches was the government purpose test of Unites States v. Bowman...

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26 Jul

Harlan Cohen and Ingrid Wuerth have provided characteristically insightful comments about the overall strengths and weaknesses of the book. Cohen cautions that its “grand narrative” may make the outcomes of particular cases seem “overdetermined” and suggest that the Supreme Court is more “purposive” about its use of international law than is actually the case. Wuerth tactfully notes that the editors’...

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27 Jun

[William S. Dodge is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. One of his articles on extraterritoriality was cited in Justice Stevens’s concurring opinion.] There is no doubt that Morrison v. National Australia Bank is a landmark opinion, not just because the Supreme Court addresses here, for the first time, the extraterritorial reach of...

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02 Jun

[We are grateful to continue our discussion on Samantar with a comment from Prof. William Dodge of the UC Hastings College of Law. Please keep following us for more thoughts in future posts and click "Related Posts" to see earlier contributions on this question.]   Like my colleague Chimene Keitner, I wrote an amicus brief supporting respondents (co-authored with Mike Ramsey), and...

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29 Jul

Picking up on the thread that Tim began and that Peter and David have advanced, I wonder if we might gain some insight by looking at the other incorporation debate that occurred during the twentieth century—the debate over which provisions of the Bill of Rights should be applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. I claim no particular expertise on...

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28 Jul

Most of the discussion so far has been about the constitutional parts of Kal’s book, which is appropriate given its title. But the part I found most fascinating has nothing to do with the Constitution. In Chapter 4, Kal tries to explain why the United States began aggressively to apply its regulatory statutes extraterritorially after World War II and not...

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27 Jul

“Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?” is a fascinating book, and one of its great strengths is that it juxtaposes a number of different examples of how law and territory do not align, some of which have been largely forgotten. When most of us think about extraterritoriality, we think of issues like the extraterritorial application of antitrust law, the applicability...

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