Abstract
I. Introduction
II. Background ... A. The Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act: State Sponsor of Terrorism Exception ... 1. History of Sovereign Immunity in U.S. Jurisprudence Under Customary International Law ... 2. The 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act ... 3. The 1996 Amendment—The State-Sponsored Terrorism Exception ... 4. The Flatow Amendment ... 5. The 2002 Amendment—The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act ... 6. The 2008 Amendment—The “New” State-Sponsored Terrorism Exception ... 7. The State-Sponsored Terrorism Exception in 2018 ... B. Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran ... 1. Facts ... 2. Procedural History ... 3. Holdings
III. Analysis ... A. The Court’s lengthy ode to the historical development and overarching structure of FSIA evince separation-of-powers concerns trumped the statutory text’s ordinary meaning ... B. The Court’s myopic application of the ambiguous “as provided in this section” language suffers from various interpretational anomalies ... C. The Court’s narrow construal of § 1610(g) dilutes the SST exception’s intended clout, contrary to statutory purpose ... D. Separation-of-powers concerns were ostensibly at the primacy of the Court’s narrow interpretation
IV. Conclusion
Recommended Citation
Jennifer Atwood,
Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran: The Supreme Court’s Textually Veiled Decision to Give State Terror Sponsors Immunity,
96 Neb. L. Rev. 977
(2017)
Available at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nlr/vol96/iss4/6