The two issues are whether respondent Alvarez-Machain's allegation that the Drug Enforcement Administration instigated his abduction from Mexico for criminal trial in the United States supports a claim against the Government under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA or Act), 28 U. S. C. §§ 1346(b)(1), 2671-2680, and whether he may recover under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), 28 U. S. C. § 1350. We hold that he is not entitled to a remedy under either statute.
I
We have considered the underlying facts before, United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992). In 1985, an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Enrique Camarena-Salazar, was captured on assignment in Mexico and taken to a house in Guadalajara, where he was tortured over the course of a 2-day interrogation, then murdered. Based in part on eyewitness testimony, DEA officials in the United States came to believe that respondent Humberto Alvarez-Machain (Alvarez), a Mexican physician, was present at the house and acted to prolong the agent's life in order to extend the interrogation and torture. Id., at 657.
In 1990, a federal grand jury indicted Alvarez for the torture and murder of Camarena-Salazar, and the United States District Court for the Central District of California issued a
Once in American custody, Alvarez moved to dismiss the indictment on the ground that his seizure was "outrageous governmental conduct," Alvarez-Machain, 504 U. S., at 658, and violated the extradition treaty between the United States and Mexico. The District Court agreed, the Ninth Circuit affirmed, and we reversed, id., at 670, holding that the fact of Alvarez's forcible seizure did not affect the jurisdiction of a federal court. The case was tried in 1992, and ended at the close of the Government's case, when the District Court granted Alvarez's motion for a judgment of acquittal.
In 1993, after returning to Mexico, Alvarez began the civil action before us here. He sued Sosa, Mexican citizen and DEA operative Antonio Garate-Bustamante, five unnamed Mexican civilians, the United States, and four DEA agents. 331 F. 3d, at 610. So far as it matters here, Alvarez sought damages from the United States under the FTCA, alleging false arrest, and from Sosa under the ATS, for a violation of the law of nations. The former statute authorizes suit "for . . . personal injury . . . caused by the negligent or wrongful act or omission of any employee of the Government while acting within the scope of his office or employment." 28 U. S. C. § 1346(b)(1). The latter provides in its entirety that "[t]he district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation
The District Court granted the Government's motion to dismiss the FTCA claim, but awarded summary judgment and $25,000 in damages to Alvarez on the ATS claim. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit then affirmed the ATS judgment, but reversed the dismissal of the FTCA claim. 266 F.3d 1045 (2001).
A divided en banc court came to the same conclusion. 331 F. 3d, at 641. As for the ATS claim, the court called on its own precedent, "that [the ATS] not only provides federal courts with subject matter jurisdiction, but also creates a cause of action for an alleged violation of the law of nations." Id., at 612. The Circuit then relied upon what it called the "clear and universally recognized norm prohibiting arbitrary arrest and detention," id., at 620, to support the conclusion that Alvarez's arrest amounted to a tort in violation of international law. On the FTCA claim, the Ninth Circuit held that, because "the DEA had no authority to effect Alvarez's arrest and detention in Mexico," id., at 608, the United States was liable to him under California law for the tort of false arrest, id., at 640-641.
We granted certiorari in these companion cases to clarify the scope of both the FTCA and the ATS. 540 U.S. 1045 (2003). We now reverse in each.
II
The Government seeks reversal of the judgment of liability under the FTCA on two principal grounds. It argues that the arrest could not have been tortious, because it was authorized by 21 U. S. C. § 878, setting out the arrest authority of the DEA, and it says that in any event the liability asserted here falls within the FTCA exception to waiver of sovereign immunity for claims "arising in a foreign country," 28 U. S. C. § 2680(k). We think the exception applies and decide on that ground.
The FTCA "was designed primarily to remove the sovereign immunity of the United States from suits in tort and, with certain specific exceptions, to render the Government liable in tort as a private individual would be under like circumstances." Richards v. United States, 369 U.S. 1, 6 (1962); see also 28 U. S. C. § 2674. The Act accordingly gives federal district courts jurisdiction over claims against the United States for injury "caused by the negligent or wrongful act or omission of any employee of the Government while acting within the scope of his office or employment, under circumstances where the United States, if a private person, would be liable to the claimant in accordance with the law of the place where the act or omission occurred." § 1346(b)(1). But the Act also limits its waiver of sovereign immunity in a number of ways. See § 2680 (no waiver as to, e. g., "[a]ny claim arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter," "[a]ny claim for damages caused by the imposition or establishment of a quarantine by the United States," or "[a]ny claim arising from the activities of the Panama Canal Company").
Here the significant limitation on the waiver of immunity is the Act's exception for "[a]ny claim arising in a foreign country," § 2680(k), a provision that on its face seems plainly applicable to the facts of this action. In the Ninth Circuit's view, once Alvarez was within the borders of the United States, his detention was not tortious, see 331 F. 3d, at 636-637; the appellate court suggested that the Government's liability to Alvarez rested solely upon a false arrest claim. Id., at 640-641. Alvarez's arrest, however, was said to be "false," and thus tortious, only because, and only to the extent that, it took place and endured in Mexico.
Notwithstanding the straightforward language of the foreign country exception, the Ninth Circuit allowed the action to proceed under what has come to be known as the "headquarters doctrine." Some Courts of Appeals, reasoning that "[t]he entire scheme of the FTCA focuses on the place where the negligent or wrongful act or omission of the government employee occurred," Sami v. United States, 617 F.2d 755, 761 (CADC 1979), have concluded that the foreign country exception does not exempt the United States from suit "for acts or omissions occurring here which have their operative effect in another country." Id., at 762 (refusing to apply § 2680(k) where a communique sent from the United States by a federal law enforcement officer resulted in plaintiff's wrongful detention in Germany).
Thus, the Ninth Circuit held that Alvarez's claim did not "aris[e] in" a foreign country.
The potential effect of this sort of headquarters analysis flashes the yellow caution light. "[I]t will virtually always be possible to assert that the negligent activity that injured the plaintiff [abroad] was the consequence of faulty training, selection or supervision—or even less than that, lack of careful training, selection or supervision—in the United States." Beattie v. United States, 756 F.2d 91, 119 (CADC 1984) (Scalia, J., dissenting). Legal malpractice claims, Knisley v. United States, 817 F.Supp. 680, 691-693 (SD Ohio 1993), allegations of negligent medical care, Newborn v. United States, 238 F.Supp.2d 145, 148-149 (DC 2002), and even slip-and-fall cases, Eaglin v. United States, Dept. of Army, 794 F.2d 981, 983-984 (CA5 1986), can all be repackaged as headquarters claims based on a failure to train, a failure to warn, the offering of bad advice, or the adoption of a negligent policy. If
The need for skepticism is borne out by two considerations. One of them is pertinent to cases like this one, where harm was arguably caused both by individual action in a foreign country as well as by planning in the United States; the other is suggested simply because the harm occurred on foreign soil.
B
Although not every headquarters case is rested on an explicit analysis of proximate causation, this notion of cause is necessary to connect the domestic breach of duty (at headquarters) with the action in the foreign country (in a case like this) producing the foreign harm or injury. It is necessary, in other words, to conclude that the act or omission at home headquarters was sufficiently close to the ultimate injury, and sufficiently important in producing it, to make it reasonable to follow liability back to the headquarters behavior. Only in this way could the behavior at headquarters properly be seen as the act or omission on which all FTCA liability must rest under §2675. See, e. g., Cominotto, supra, at 1130 ("[A] headquarters claim exists where negligent acts in the United States proximately cause harm in a foreign country"); Eaglin, supra, at 983 (noting that headquarters cases require "a plausible proximate nexus or connection between acts or omissions in the United States and the resulting damage or injury in a foreign country").
Recognizing this connection of proximate cause between domestic behavior and foreign harm or injury is not, however, sufficient of itself to bar application of the foreign country exception to a claim resting on that same foreign consequence.
C
Not only does domestic proximate causation under the headquarters doctrine fail to eliminate application of the foreign country exception, but there is good reason to think that Congress understood a claim "arising in" a foreign country in such a way as to bar application of the headquarters doctrine. There is good reason, that is, to conclude that Congress understood a claim "arising in a foreign country" to be a claim for injury or harm occurring in a foreign country. 28 U. S. C. § 2680(k). This sense of "arising in" was the common usage in state borrowing statutes contemporary with the Act, which operated to determine which State's statute of limitations should apply in cases involving transjurisdictional facts. When the FTCA was passed, the general rule, as set out in various state statutes, was that "a cause of action arising in another jurisdiction, which is barred by the laws of that jurisdiction, will [also] be barred in the domestic courts." 41 A. L. R. 4th 1025, 1029, § 2 (1985). These borrowing
There is, moreover, specific reason to believe that using "arising in" as referring to place of harm was central to the object of the foreign country exception. Any tort action in a court of the United States based on the acts of a Government employee causing harm outside the State of the district court in which the action is filed requires a determination of the source of the substantive law that will govern liability. When the FTCA was passed, the dominant principle in choice-of-law analysis for tort cases was lex loci delicti: courts generally applied the law of the place where the injury occurred. See Richards v. United States, 369 U. S., at 11-12 ("The general conflict-of-laws rule, followed by a vast majority of the States, is to apply the law of the place of injury to the substantive rights of the parties" (footnote omitted)); see also Restatement (First) of Conflict of Laws § 379 (1934) (defendant's liability determined by "the law of the place of wrong");
The application of foreign substantive law exemplified in these cases was, however, what Congress intended to avoid by the foreign country exception. In 1942, the House Committee on the Judiciary considered an early draft of the FTCA that would have exempted all claims "arising in a foreign country in behalf of an alien." H. R. 5373, 77th Cong., 2d Sess., § 303(12). The bill was then revised, at the suggestion of the Attorney General, to omit the last five words. In explaining the amendment to the House Committee on the Judiciary, Assistant Attorney General Shea said that
The amended version, which was enacted into law and constitutes the current text of the foreign country exception, 28 U. S. C. § 2680(k), thus codified Congress's "unwilling[ness] to subject the United States to liabilities depending upon the laws of a foreign power." United States v. Spelar, 338 U.S. 217, 221 (1949). See also Sami v. United States, 617 F. 2d, at 762 (noting Spelar's explanation but attempting to recast the object behind the foreign country exception); Leaf v. United States, 588 F.2d 733, 736, n. 3 (CA9 1978).
The object being to avoid application of substantive foreign law, Congress evidently used the modifier "arising in a foreign country" to refer to claims based on foreign harm or
Nor, as a practical matter, can it be said that the headquarters doctrine has outgrown its tension with the exception. It is true that the traditional approach to choice of substantive tort law has lost favor, Simson, The Choice-of-Law Revolution in the United States: Notes on Rereading Von Mehren, 36 Cornell Int'l L. J. 125 (2002) ("The traditional methodology of place of wrong . . . has receded in importance, and new approaches and concepts such as governmental interest analysis, most significant relationship, and better rule of law have taken over center stage" (footnotes omitted)).
Equally to the point is that in at least some cases that the Court of Appeals's approach would treat as arising at headquarters, not the foreign country, even the later methodologies of choice point to the application of foreign law. The Second Restatement itself, encouraging the general shift toward using flexible balancing analysis to inform choice of law,
In sum, current flexibility in choice-of-law methodology gives no assurance against applying foreign substantive law if federal courts follow headquarters doctrine to assume jurisdiction over tort claims against the Government for foreign harm. Based on the experience just noted, the expectation is that application of the headquarters doctrine would in fact result in a substantial number of cases applying the very foreign law the foreign country exception was meant to avoid.
Before concluding that headquarters analysis should have no part in applying the foreign country exception, however,
III
Alvarez has also brought an action under the ATS against petitioner Sosa, who argues (as does the United States supporting him) that there is no relief under the ATS because the statute does no more than vest federal courts with jurisdiction, neither creating nor authorizing the courts to recognize any particular right of action without further congressional action. Although we agree the statute is in terms only jurisdictional, we think that at the time of enactment the jurisdiction enabled federal courts to hear claims in a very limited category defined by the law of nations and recognized at common law. We do not believe, however, that the limited, implicit sanction to entertain the handful of international law cum common law claims understood in 1789 should be taken as authority to recognize the right of action asserted by Alvarez here.
A
Judge Friendly called the ATS a "legal Lohengrin," IIT v. Vencap, Ltd., 519 F.2d 1001, 1015 (CA2 1975); "no one seems to know whence it came," ibid., and for over 170 years after its enactment it provided jurisdiction in only one case. The first Congress passed it as part of the Judiciary Act of 1789, in providing that the new federal district courts "shall also have cognizance, concurrent with the courts of the several States, or the circuit courts, as the case may be, of all causes where an alien sues for a tort only in violation of the
The parties and amici here advance radically different historical interpretations of this terse provision. Alvarez says that the ATS was intended not simply as a jurisdictional grant, but as authority for the creation of a new cause of action for torts in violation of international law. We think that reading is implausible. As enacted in 1789, the ATS gave the district courts "cognizance" of certain causes of action, and the term bespoke a grant of jurisdiction, not power to mold substantive law. See, e. g., The Federalist No. 81, pp. 447, 451 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton) (using "jurisdiction" interchangeably with "cognizance"). The fact that the ATS was placed in § 9 of the Judiciary Act, a statute otherwise exclusively concerned with federal-court jurisdiction, is itself support for its strictly jurisdictional nature. Nor would the distinction between jurisdiction and cause of action have been elided by the drafters of the Act or those who voted on it. As Fisher Ames put it, "there is a substantial difference between the jurisdiction of the courts and the rules of decision." 1 Annals of Cong. 807 (Gales ed. 1834). It is unsurprising, then, that an authority on the historical origins of the ATS has written that "section 1350 clearly does not create a statutory cause of action," and that the contrary suggestion is "simply frivolous." Casto, The Federal Courts' Protective Jurisdiction over Torts Committed in Violation of the Law of Nations, 18 Conn. L. Rev. 467, 479, 480 (1986) (hereinafter Casto, Law of Nations); Cf. Dodge, The Constitutionality of the Alien Tort Statute: Some Observations on Text and Context, 42 Va. J. Int'l L. 687, 689 (2002).
But holding the ATS jurisdictional raises a new question, this one about the interaction between the ATS at the time of its enactment and the ambient law of the era. Sosa would have it that the ATS was stillborn because there could be no claim for relief without a further statute expressly authorizing adoption of causes of action. Amici professors of federal jurisdiction and legal history take a different tack, that federal courts could entertain claims once the jurisdictional grant was on the books, because torts in violation of the law of nations would have been recognized within the common law of the time. Brief for Vikram Amar et al. as Amici Curiae. We think history and practice give the edge to this latter position.
1
"When the United States declared their independence, they were bound to receive the law of nations, in its modern state of purity and refinement." Ware v. Hylton, 3 Dall. 199, 281 (1796) (Wilson, J.). In the years of the early Republic, this law of nations comprised two principal elements, the first covering the general norms governing the behavior of national states with each other: "the science which teaches the rights subsisting between nations or states, and the obligations correspondent to those rights," E. de Vattel, Law of Nations, Preliminaries § 3 (J. Chitty et al. transl. and ed. 1883) (hereinafter Vattel) (footnote omitted), or "that code of public instruction which defines the rights and prescribes the duties of nations, in their intercourse with each other," 1 James Kent Commentaries *1. This aspect of the law of nations thus occupied the executive and legislative domains, not the judicial. See 4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 68 (1769) (hereinafter Commentaries) ("[O]ffences against" the law of nations are "principally incident to whole states or nations").
There was, finally, a sphere in which these rules binding individuals for the benefit of other individuals overlapped with the norms of state relationships. Blackstone referred to it when he mentioned three specific offenses against the law of nations addressed by the criminal law of England: violation of safe conducts, infringement of the rights of ambassadors, and piracy. 4 Commentaries 68. An assault against an ambassador, for example, impinged upon the sovereignty of the foreign nation and if not adequately redressed could rise to an issue of war. See Vattel 463-464. It was this narrow set of violations of the law of nations, admitting of a judicial remedy and at the same time threatening serious consequences in international affairs, that was probably on minds of the men who drafted the ATS with its reference to tort.
2
Before there was any ATS, a distinctly American preoccupation with these hybrid international norms had taken
Appreciation of the Continental Congress's incapacity to deal with this class of cases was intensified by the so-called Marbois incident of May 1784, in which a French adventurer, De Longchamps, verbally and physically assaulted the Secretary of the French Legion in Philadelphia. See Respublica
The Framers responded by vesting the Supreme Court with original jurisdiction over "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public ministers and Consuls." U. S. Const., Art. III, § 2, and the First Congress followed through. The Judiciary Act reinforced this Court's original jurisdiction over suits brought by diplomats, see 1 Stat. 80, ch. 20, § 13, created alienage jurisdiction, § 11, and, of course, included the ATS, § 9. See generally Randall, Federal Jurisdiction over International Law Claims: Inquiries into the Alien Tort Statute, 18 N. Y. U. J. Int'l L. & Pol. 1, 15-21 (1985) (hereinafter
3
Although Congress modified the draft of what became the Judiciary Act, see generally Warren, New Light on the History of the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789, 37 Harv. L. Rev. 49 (1923), it made hardly any changes to the provisions on aliens, including what became the ATS, see Casto, Law of Nations 498. There is no record of congressional discussion about private actions that might be subject to the jurisdictional provision, or about any need for further legislation to create private remedies; there is no record even of debate on the section. Given the poverty of drafting history, modern commentators have necessarily concentrated on the text, remarking on the innovative use of the word "tort," see, e. g., Sweeney, A Tort only in Violation of the Law of Nations, 18 Hastings Int'l & Comp. L. Rev. 445 (1995) (arguing that "tort" refers to the law of prize), and the statute's mixture of terms expansive ("all suits"), see, e. g., Casto, Law of Nations 500, and restrictive ("for a tort only"), see, e. g., Randall 28-31 (limiting suits to torts, as opposed to commercial actions, especially by British plaintiffs).
Still, the history does tend to support two propositions. First, there is every reason to suppose that the First Congress did not pass the ATS as a jurisdictional convenience to be placed on the shelf for use by a future Congress or state legislature that might, some day, authorize the creation of causes of action or itself decide to make some element of the law of nations actionable for the benefit of foreigners. The anxieties of the preconstitutional period cannot be ignored easily enough to think that the statute was not meant to have a practical effect. Consider that the principal draftsman of the ATS was apparently Oliver Ellsworth,
4
The sparse contemporaneous cases and legal materials referring to the ATS tend to confirm both inferences, that some, but few, torts in violation of the law of nations were understood to be within the common law. In Bolchos v. Darrel, 3 F. Cas. 810 (No. 1,607) (SC 1795), the District Court's doubt about admiralty jurisdiction over a suit for damages brought by a French privateer against the mortgagee of a British slave ship was assuaged by assuming that the ATS was a jurisdictional basis for the court's action. Nor is Moxon v. The Fanny, 17 F. Cas. 942 (No. 9,895) (Pa. 1793), to the contrary, a case in which the owners of a British ship sought damages for its seizure in United States waters by a French privateer. The District Court said in dictum that the ATS was not the proper vehicle for suit because "[i]t cannot be called a suit for a tort only, when the property, as well as damages for the supposed trespass, are sought for." Id., at 948. But the judge gave no intimation that further legislation would have been needed to give the District Court jurisdiction over a suit limited to damages.
Although it is conceivable that Bradford (who had prosecuted in the Marbois incident, see Casto, Law of Nations 503, n. 201) assumed that there had been a violation of a treaty, 1 Op. Atty. Gen., at 58, that is certainly not obvious, and it appears likely that Bradford understood the ATS to provide jurisdiction over what must have amounted to common law causes of action.
B
Against these indications that the ATS was meant to underwrite litigation of a narrow set of common law actions derived from the law of nations, Sosa raises two main objections. First, he claims that this conclusion makes no sense in view of the Continental Congress's 1781 recommendation to state legislatures to pass laws authorizing such suits. Sosa thinks state legislation would have been "absurd," Reply Brief for Petitioner Sosa 5, if common law remedies had been available. Second, Sosa juxtaposes Blackstone's treatise mentioning violations of the law of nations as occasions for criminal remedies, against the statute's innovative reference to "tort," as evidence that there was no familiar
The notion that it would have been absurd for the Continental Congress to recommend that States pass positive law to duplicate remedies already available at common law rests on a misunderstanding of the relationship between common law and positive law in the late 18th century, when positive law was frequently relied upon to reinforce and give standard expression to the "brooding omnipresence"
In sum, although the ATS is a jurisdictional statute creating no new causes of action, the reasonable inference from the historical materials is that the statute was intended to have practical effect the moment it became law. The jurisdictional grant is best read as having been enacted on the understanding that the common law would provide a cause of action for the modest number of international law violations with a potential for personal liability at the time.
IV
We think it is correct, then, to assume that the First Congress understood that the district courts would recognize private causes of action for certain torts in violation of the law of nations, though we have found no basis to suspect Congress had any examples in mind beyond those torts corresponding to Blackstone's three primary offenses: violation of safe conducts, infringement of the rights of ambassadors, and piracy. We assume, too, that no development in the two centuries from the enactment of § 1350 to the birth of the
A
A series of reasons argue for judicial caution when considering the kinds of individual claims that might implement the jurisdiction conferred by the early statute. First, the prevailing conception of the common law has changed since 1789 in a way that counsels restraint in judicially applying internationally generated norms. When § 1350 was enacted, the accepted conception was of the common law as "a transcendental body of law outside of any particular State but obligatory within it unless and until changed by statute." Black and White Taxicab & Transfer Co. v. Brown and Yellow Taxicab & Transfer Co., 276 U.S. 518, 533 (1928) (Holmes, J., dissenting). Now, however, in most cases where a court is asked to state or formulate a common law principle in a new context, there is a general understanding that the law is not so much found or discovered as it is either made or created. Holmes explained famously in 1881 that
One need not accept the Holmesian view as far as its ultimate implications to acknowledge that a judge deciding in reliance on an international norm will find a substantial element of discretionary judgment in the decision.
Second, along with, and in part driven by, that conceptual development in understanding common law has come an equally significant rethinking of the role of the federal courts in making it. Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), was the watershed in which we denied the existence of any federal "general" common law, id., at 78, which largely withdrew to havens of specialty, some of them defined by express congressional authorization to devise a body of law directly, e. g., Textile Workers v. Lincoln Mills of Ala., 353 U.S. 448 (1957) (interpretation of collective-bargaining agreements); Fed. Rule Evid. 501 (evidentiary privileges in federal-question cases). Elsewhere, this Court has thought it was in order to create federal common law rules in interstitial areas of particular federal interest. E. g., United States v. Kimbell Foods, Inc., 440 U.S. 715, 726-727 (1979).
Fourth, the subject of those collateral consequences is itself a reason for a high bar to new private causes of action for violating international law, for the potential implications for the foreign relations of the United States of recognizing such causes should make courts particularly wary of impinging on the discretion of the Legislative and Executive Branches in managing foreign affairs. It is one thing for American courts to enforce constitutional limits on our own State and Federal Governments' power, but quite another to consider suits under rules that would go so far as to claim a limit on the power of foreign governments over their own citizens, and to hold that a foreign government or its agent has transgressed those limits. Cf. Sabbatino, supra, at 431-432. Yet modern international law is very much concerned with just such questions, and apt to stimulate calls for vindicating private interests in § 1350 cases. Since many attempts by federal courts to craft remedies for the violation
The fifth reason is particularly important in light of the first four. We have no congressional mandate to seek out and define new and debatable violations of the law of nations, and modern indications of congressional understanding of the judicial role in the field have not affirmatively encouraged greater judicial creativity. It is true that a clear mandate appears in the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, 106 Stat. 73, providing authority that "establish[es] an unambiguous and modern basis for" federal claims of torture and extrajudicial killing, H. R. Rep. No. 102-367, pt. 1, p. 3 (1991). But that affirmative authority is confined to specific subject matter, and although the legislative history includes the remark that § 1350 should "remain intact to permit suits based on other norms that already exist or may ripen in the future into rules of customary international law," id., at 4, Congress as a body has done nothing to promote such suits. Several times, indeed, the Senate has expressly declined to give the federal courts the task of interpreting and applying international human rights law, as when its ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights declared that the substantive provisions of the document were not self-executing. 138 Cong. Rec. 8071 (1992).
B
These reasons argue for great caution in adapting the law of nations to private rights. JUSTICE SCALIA, post, p. 739 (opinion concurring in part and concurring in judgment), concludes that caution is too hospitable, and a word is in order
Whereas JUSTICE SCALIA sees these developments as sufficient to close the door to further independent judicial recognition of actionable international norms, other considerations persuade us that the judicial power should be exercised on the understanding that the door is still ajar subject to vigilant doorkeeping, and thus open to a narrow class of international norms today. Erie did not in terms bar any judicial recognition of new substantive rules, no matter what the circumstances, and post-Erie understanding has identified limited enclaves in which federal courts may derive some substantive law in a common law way. For two centuries we have affirmed that the domestic law of the United States recognizes the law of nations. See, e. g., Sabbatino, 376 U. S., at 423 ("[I]t is, of course, true that United States
We think an attempt to justify such a position would be particularly unconvincing in light of what we know about congressional understanding bearing on this issue lying at the intersection of the judicial and legislative powers. The First Congress, which reflected the understanding of the framing generation and included some of the Framers, assumed that federal courts could properly identify some international norms as enforceable in the exercise of § 1350 jurisdiction. We think it would be unreasonable to assume that the First Congress would have expected federal courts to lose all capacity to recognize enforceable international norms simply because the common law might lose some metaphysical cachet on the road to modern realism. Later Congresses
While we agree with JUSTICE SCALIA to the point that we would welcome any congressional guidance in exercising jurisdiction with such obvious potential to affect foreign relations, nothing Congress has done is a reason for us to shut the door to the law of nations entirely. It is enough to say that Congress may do that at any time (explicitly, or implicitly by treaties or statutes that occupy the field), just as it may modify or cancel any judicial decision so far as it rests on recognizing an international norm as such.
C
We must still, however, derive a standard or set of standards for assessing the particular claim Alvarez raises, and
Thus, Alvarez's detention claim must be gauged against the current state of international law, looking to those sources we have long, albeit cautiously, recognized.
To begin with, Alvarez cites two well-known international agreements that, despite their moral authority, have little utility under the standard set out in this opinion. He says that his abduction by Sosa was an "arbitrary arrest" within the meaning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Declaration), G. A. Res. 217A (III), U. N. Doc. A/810 (1948). And he traces the rule against arbitrary arrest not only to the Declaration, but also to article nine of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Covenant), Dec. 16, 1966, 999 U. N. T. S. 171,
Here, it is useful to examine Alvarez's complaint in greater detail. As he presently argues it, the claim does not rest on the cross-border feature of his abduction.
Alvarez thus invokes a general prohibition of "arbitrary" detention defined as officially sanctioned action exceeding positive authorization to detain under the domestic law of some government, regardless of the circumstances. Whether or not this is an accurate reading of the Covenant, Alvarez cites little authority that a rule so broad has the status of a binding customary norm today.
Alvarez's failure to marshal support for his proposed rule is underscored by the Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law of the United States (1986), which says in its discussion of customary international human rights law that a "state violates international law if, as a matter of state policy, it practices, encourages, or condones . . . prolonged arbitrary detention." 2 id., § 702. Although the Restatement does not explain its requirements of a "state policy" and of "prolonged" detention, the implication is clear. Any credible invocation of a principle against arbitrary detention that the civilized world accepts as binding customary international law requires a factual basis beyond relatively brief detention in excess of positive authority. Even the Restatement's limits are only the beginning of the enquiry, because although it is easy to say that some policies of prolonged arbitrary detentions are so bad that those who enforce them become enemies of the human race, it may be harder to say which policies cross that line with the certainty afforded by Blackstone's three common law offenses. In any event, the label would never fit the reckless policeman who botches his warrant, even though that same officer might pay damages under municipal law. E. g., Groh v. Ramirez, 540 U.S. 551 (2004).
* * *
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is
Reversed.
There is not much that I would add to the Court's detailed opinion, and only one thing that I would subtract: its reservation of a discretionary power in the Federal Judiciary to create causes of action for the enforcement of international-law-based norms. Accordingly, I join Parts I, II, and III of the Court's opinion in these consolidated cases. Although I agree with much in Part IV, I cannot join it because the judicial lawmaking role it invites would commit the Federal Judiciary to a task it is neither authorized nor suited to perform.
I
The question at hand is whether the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), 28 U. S. C. § 1350, provides respondent Alvarez-Machain (hereinafter respondent) a cause of action to sue in federal court to recover money damages for violation of what is claimed to be a customary international law norm against arbitrary arrest and detention. The ATS provides that "[t]he district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." Ibid. The challenge posed by this action is to ascertain (in the Court's felicitous phrase) "the interaction between the ATS at the time of its enactment and the ambient law of the era." Ante, at 714. I begin by describing the general principles that must guide our analysis.
At the time of its enactment, the ATS provided a federal forum in which aliens could bring suit to recover for torts committed in "violation of the law of nations." The law of nations that would have been applied in this federal forum was at the time part of the so-called general common law. See Young, Sorting out the Debate Over Customary International Law, 42 Va. J. Int'l L. 365, 374 (2002); Bradley & Goldsmith,
General common law was not federal law under the Supremacy Clause, which gave that effect only to the Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties. U. S. Const., Art. VI, cl. 2. Federal and state courts adjudicating questions of general common law were not adjudicating questions of federal or state law, respectively — the general common law was neither. See generally Clark, Federal Common Law: A Structural Reinterpretation, 144 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1245, 1279-1285 (1996). The nonfederal nature of the law of nations explains this Court's holding that it lacked jurisdiction in New York Life Ins. Co. v. Hendren, 92 U.S. 286 (1876), where it was asked to review a state-court decision regarding "the effect, under the general public law, of a state of sectional civil war upon [a] contract of life insurance." Ibid. Although the case involved "the general laws of war, as recognized by the law of nations applicable to this case," ibid., it involved no federal question. The Court concluded: "The case, . . . having been presented to the court below for decision upon principles of general law alone, and it nowhere appearing that the constitution, laws, treaties, or executive proclamations, of the United States were necessarily involved in the decision, we have no jurisdiction." Id., at 287.
This Court's decision in Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), signaled the end of federal-court elaboration and application of the general common law. Erie repudiated the holding of Swift v. Tyson, 16 Pet. 1 (1842), that federal courts were free to "express our own opinion" upon "the principles established in the general commercial law." Id., at 19, 18. After canvassing the many problems resulting from "the broad province accorded to the so-called `general law' as to which federal courts exercised an independent judgment,"
After the death of the old general common law in Erie came the birth of a new and different common law pronounced by federal courts. There developed a specifically federal common law (in the sense of judicially pronounced law) for a "few and restricted" areas in which "a federal rule of decision is necessary to protect uniquely federal interests, and those in which Congress has given the courts the power to develop substantive law." Texas Industries, Inc. v. Radcliff Materials, Inc., 451 U.S. 630, 640 (1981) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Unlike the general common law that preceded it, however, federal common law was self-consciously "made" rather than "discovered," by judges who sought to avoid falling under the sway of (in Holmes's hyperbolic language) "[t]he fallacy and illusion" that there exists "a transcendental body of law outside of any particular State but obligatory within it unless and until changed by statute." Black and White Taxicab & Transfer Co. v. Brown and Yellow Taxicab & Transfer Co., 276 U.S. 518, 533 (1928) (dissenting opinion).
Because post-Erie federal common law is made, not discovered, federal courts must possess some federal-common-law-making authority before undertaking to craft it. "Federal courts, unlike state courts, are not general common-law courts and do not possess a general power to develop and apply their own rules of decision." Milwaukee v. Illinois, 451 U.S. 304, 312 (1981).
The general rule as formulated in Texas Industries, 451 U. S., at 640-641, is that "[t]he vesting of jurisdiction in the federal courts does not in and of itself give rise to authority
The rule against finding a delegation of substantive lawmaking power in a grant of jurisdiction is subject to exceptions, some better established than others. The most firmly entrenched is admiralty law, derived from the grant of admiralty jurisdiction in Article III, § 2, cl. 3, of the Constitution. In the exercise of that jurisdiction federal courts develop and apply a body of general maritime law, "the well-known and well-developed venerable law of the sea which arose from the custom among seafaring men." R. M. S. Titanic, Inc. v. Haver, 171 F.3d 943, 960 (CA4 1999) (Niemeyer, J.) (internal quotation marks omitted). At the other extreme is Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), which created a private damages cause of action against federal officials for violation of the Fourth Amendment. We have said that the authority to create this cause of action was derived from "our general jurisdiction to decide all cases `arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States.'" Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko, 534 U.S. 61, 66 (2001) (quoting 28 U. S. C. § 1331). While Bivens stands, the ground supporting it has eroded. For the past 25 years, "we have consistently refused to extend Bivens liability to any new context." Correctional Services Corp., supra, at 68. Bivens is "a relic of the heady days in which this Court assumed common-law powers to create causes of action." 534 U. S., at 75 (SCALIA, J., concurring).
With these general principles in mind, I turn to the question presented. The Court's detailed exegesis of the ATS conclusively establishes that it is "a jurisdictional statute creating no new causes of action." Ante, at 724. The Court provides a persuasive explanation of why respondent's contrary interpretation, that "the ATS was intended not simply as a jurisdictional grant, but as authority for the creation of a new cause of action for torts in violation of international law," is wrong. Ante, at 713. Indeed, the Court properly endorses the views of one scholar that this interpretation is "`simply frivolous.'" Ibid. (quoting Casto, The Federal Courts' Protective Jurisdiction over Torts Committed in Violation of the Law of Nations, 18 Conn. L. Rev. 467, 479, 480 (1986)).
These conclusions are alone enough to dispose of the present case in favor of petitioner Sosa. None of the exceptions to the general rule against finding substantive lawmaking power in a jurisdictional grant apply. Bivens provides perhaps the closest analogy. That is shaky authority at best, but at least it can be said that Bivens sought to enforce a command of our own law — the United States Constitution. In modern international human rights litigation of the sort that has proliferated since Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, 630 F.2d 876 (CA2 1980), a federal court must first create the underlying federal command. But "the fact that a rule has been recognized as [customary international law], by itself, is not an adequate basis for viewing that rule as part of federal common law." Meltzer, Customary International Law, Foreign Affairs, and Federal Common Law, 42 Va. J. Int'l L. 513, 519 (2002). In Benthamite terms, creating a federal command (federal common law) out of "international norms," and then constructing a cause of action to enforce that command through the purely jurisdictional grant of the ATS, is nonsense upon stilts.
The analysis in the Court's opinion departs from my own in this respect: After concluding in Part III that "the ATS is a jurisdictional statute creating no new causes of action," ante, at 724, the Court addresses at length in Part IV the "good reasons for a restrained conception of the discretion a federal court should exercise in considering a new cause of action" under the ATS. Ante, at 725 (emphasis added). By framing the issue as one of "discretion," the Court skips over the antecedent question of authority. This neglects the "lesson of Erie," that "grants of jurisdiction alone" (which the Court has acknowledged the ATS to be) "are not themselves grants of lawmaking authority." Meltzer, supra, at 541. On this point, the Court observes only that no development between the enactment of the ATS (in 1789) and the birth of modern international human rights litigation under that statute (in 1980) "has categorically precluded federal courts from recognizing a claim under the law of nations as an element of common law." Ante, at 725 (emphasis added). This turns our jurisprudence regarding federal common law on its head. The question is not what case or congressional action prevents federal courts from applying the law of nations as part of the general common law; it is what authorizes that peculiar exception from Erie's fundamental holding that a general common law does not exist.
The Court would apparently find authorization in the understanding of the Congress that enacted the ATS, that "district courts would recognize private causes of action for certain torts in violation of the law of nations." Ante, at 724. But as discussed above, that understanding rested upon a notion of general common law that has been repudiated by Erie.
The Court recognizes that Erie was a "watershed" decision heralding an avulsive change, wrought by "conceptual development in understanding common law . . . [and accompanied by an] equally significant rethinking of the role of the federal courts in making it." Ante, at 726. The Court's
Although I fundamentally disagree with the discretion-based framework employed by the Court, we seem to be in accord that creating a new federal common law of international human rights is a questionable enterprise. We agree that:
These considerations are not, as the Court thinks them, reasons why courts must be circumspect in use of their extant general-common-law-making powers. They are reasons why courts cannot possibly be thought to have been given, and should not be thought to possess, federal-common-law-making powers with regard to the creation of private federal causes of action for violations of customary international law.
To be sure, today's opinion does not itself precipitate a direct confrontation with Congress by creating a cause of action that Congress has not. But it invites precisely that action by the lower courts, even while recognizing (1) that Congress understood the difference between granting jurisdiction and creating a federal cause of action in 1789, ante, at 713, (2) that Congress understands that difference today, ante, at 728, and (3) that the ATS itself supplies only jurisdiction, ante, at 724. In holding open the possibility that judges may create rights where Congress has not authorized them to do so, the Court countenances judicial occupation of a domain that belongs to the people's representatives. One does not need a crystal ball to predict that this occupation will not be long in coming, since the Court endorses the reasoning of "many of the courts and judges who faced the issue before it reached this Court," including the Second and Ninth Circuits. Ante, at 732.
The Ninth Circuit brought us the judgment that the Court reverses today. Perhaps its decision in this particular case,
The Second Circuit, which started the Judiciary down the path the Court today tries to hedge in, is a good indicator of where that path leads us: directly into confrontation with the political branches. Kadic v. Karadžić, 70 F.3d 232 (CA2 1995), provides a case in point. One of the norms at issue in that case was a norm against genocide set forth in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Dec. 9, 1948, 78 U. N. T. S. 278. The Second Circuit held that the norm was actionable under the ATS after applying Circuit case law that the Court today endorses. 70 F. 3d, at 238-239, 241-242. The Court of Appeals then did something that is perfectly logical and yet truly remarkable: It dismissed the determination by Congress and the Executive that this norm should not give rise to a private cause of action. We know that Congress and the Executive made this determination, because Congress inscribed it into the Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987, 18 U. S. C. § 1091 et seq., a law signed by the
Though it is not necessary to resolution of the present action, one further consideration deserves mention: Despite the avulsive change of Erie, the Framers who included reference to "the Law of Nations" in Article I, § 8, cl. 10, of the Constitution would be entirely content with the post-Erie system I have described, and quite terrified by the "discretion" endorsed by the Court. That portion of the general common law known as the law of nations was understood to refer to the accepted practices of nations in their dealings with one another (treatment of ambassadors, immunity of foreign sovereigns from suit, etc.) and with actors on the high seas hostile to all nations and beyond all their territorial jurisdictions (pirates). Those accepted practices have for the most part, if not in their entirety, been enacted into United States statutory law, so that insofar as they are concerned the demise of the general common law is inconsequential. The notion that a law of nations, redefined to mean the consensus of states on any subject, can be used by a private citizen to
* * *
We Americans have a method for making the laws that are over us. We elect representatives to two Houses of Congress, each of which must enact the new law and present it for the approval of a President, whom we also elect. For over two decades now, unelected federal judges have been usurping this lawmaking power by converting what they regard as norms of international law into American law. Today's opinion approves that process in principle, though urging the lower courts to be more restrained.
This Court seems incapable of admitting that some matters—any matters—are none of its business. See, e.g., Rasul v. Bush, ante, p. 466; INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289 (2001). In today's latest victory for its Never Say Never Jurisprudence, the Court ignores its own conclusion that the ATS provides only jurisdiction, wags a finger at the lower courts for going too far, and then — repeating the same formula the ambitious lower courts themselves have used — invites them to try again.
It would be bad enough if there were some assurance that future conversions of perceived international norms into American law would be approved by this Court itself. (Though we know ourselves to be eminently reasonable, self-awareness of eminent reasonableness is not really a substitute for democratic election.) But in this illegitimate lawmaking endeavor, the lower federal courts will be the principal
American law — the law made by the people's democratically elected representatives — does not recognize a category of activity that is so universally disapproved by other nations that it is automatically unlawful here, and automatically gives rise to a private action for money damages in federal court. That simple principle is what today's decision should have announced.
JUSTICE GINSBURG, with whom JUSTICE BREYER joins, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I join in full the Court's disposition of Alvarez's claim pursuant to 28 U. S. C. § 1350. See ante, at 712-738. As to Alvarez's Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA or Act) claim, see ante, at 699-712, although I agree with the Court's result and much of its reasoning, I take a different path and would adopt a different construction of 28 U. S. C. § 2680(k). Alvarez's case against the Government does not call for any comparison of old versus newer choice-of-law methodologies. See ante, at 708-710. See generally Kay, Theory into Practice: Choice of Law in the Courts, 34 Mercer L. Rev. 521, 525-584 (1983). In particular, the Court's discussion of developments in choice of law after the FTCA's enactment hardly illuminates the meaning of that statute, and risks giving undue prominence to a jurisdiction-selecting approach the vast majority of States have long abandoned. See Symeonides, Choice of Law in the American Courts in 2002: Sixteenth Annual Survey, 51 Am. J. Comp. L. 1, 5-6 (2003) (lex loci delicti rule has been abandoned in 42 States).
I
The FTCA renders the United States liable for tort claims "in the same manner and to the same extent as a private individual under like circumstances." 28 U. S. C. § 2674. The Act gives federal district courts "exclusive jurisdiction
On its face, the foreign-country exception appears to cover this litigation. See ante, at 700. Alvarez's suit is predicated on an arrest in Mexico alleged to be "false" only because it occurred there. Sosa's conduct in Mexico, implicating questions of Mexican law, is, as the Court notes, "the kernel" of Alvarez's claim. Ante, at 701. Once Alvarez was inside United States borders, the Ninth Circuit observed, no activity regarding his detention was tortious. See 331 F.3d 604, 636-637 (2003). Government liability to Alvarez, as analyzed by the Court of Appeals, rested solely upon a false-arrest claim. Id., at 640-641. Just as Alvarez's arrest was "false," and thus tortious, only because, and only to the extent that, it took place and endured in Mexico, so damages accrued only while the alleged wrongful conduct continued abroad. Id., at 636-637.
Critical in the Ninth Circuit's view, "DEA agents had no authority under federal law to execute an extraterritorial arrest of a suspect indicted in federal court in Los Angeles." Id., at 640; see ante, at 700-701, n. 1. See also Fermino v. Fedco, Inc., 7 Cal.4th 701, 715, 872 P.2d 559, 567 (1994) (defining as tortious "the nonconsensual, intentional confinement of a person, without lawful privilege, for an appreciable length of time, however short" (emphasis added and internal quotation marks omitted)); App. to Pet. for Cert. 184a in No. 03-339 (same). Once Alvarez arrived in El Paso, Texas, "the actions of domestic law enforcement set in motion
Accepting, as the Ninth Circuit did, that no tortious act occurred once Alvarez was within United States borders, the Government's liability on Alvarez's claim for false arrest necessarily depended on the foreign location of the arrest and implicated foreign law. While the Court of Appeals focused on whether United States law furnished authority to seize Alvarez in Mexican territory, see 331 F. 3d, at 626-631, Mexican law equally could have provided — or denied — authority for such an arrest. Had Sosa and the arrest team been Mexican law enforcement officers, authorized by Mexican law to arrest Alvarez and to hand him over to United States authorities, for example, no false-arrest claim would have been tenable. Similarly, there would have been no viable false-arrest claim if Mexican law authorized a citizen's arrest in the circumstances presented here. Indeed, Mexican and Honduran agents seized other suspects indicted along with Alvarez, respectively in Mexico and Honduras; "Alvarez's abduction was unique in that it involved neither the cooperation of local police nor the consent of a foreign government." Id., at 623, n. 23.
The interpretation of the FTCA adopted by the Ninth Circuit, in short, yielded liability based on acts occurring in Mexico that entangled questions of foreign law. Subjecting the United States to liability depending upon the law of a foreign sovereign, however, was the very result § 2680(k)'s foreign-country exception aimed to exclude. See United States v. Spelar, 338 U.S. 217, 221 (1949).
B
I would construe the foreign-country exception, § 2680(k), in harmony with the FTCA's sovereign-immunity waiver, § 1346(b), which refers to the place where the negligent or intentional act occurred. See Brief for United States in
Interpretation of § 2680(k) in the light of § 1346, as the Government maintains, is grounded in this Court's precedent. In construing § 2680(k)'s reference to a "foreign country," this Court has "draw[n] support from the language of § 1346(b), the principal provision of the [FTCA]." Smith v. United States, 507 U.S. 197, 201 (1993) (internal quotation marks omitted). In Smith, the Court held that a wrongful-death action "based exclusively on acts or omissions occurring in Antarctica" was barred by the foreign-country exception. Id., at 198-199. Were it not, the Court noted, "§ 1346(b) would instruct courts to look to the law of a place that has no law [i. e., Antarctica] in order to determine the liability of the United States—surely a bizarre result." Id., at 201-202. Thus, in Smith, the Court presumed that the place "where the act or omission occurred" for purposes of the sovereign-immunity waiver, § 1346(b)(1), coincided with the place where the "claim ar[ose]" for purposes of the foreign-country exception, § 2680(k). See also Beattie v. United States, 756 F.2d 91, 122 (CADC 1984) (Scalia, J., dissenting) ("[A] claim `arises' for purposes of § 2680(k) where there occurs the alleged [standard-of-care] violation ... (attributable to government action or inaction) nearest to the injury...."); Sami v. United States, 617 F.2d 755, 761-762 (CADC 1979) (looking to where "the act or omission complained of occurred" in applying § 2680(k)).
Harmonious construction of §§ 1346(b) and 2680(k) accords with Congress' intent in enacting the foreign-country exception. Congress was "unwilling to subject the United States to liabilities depending upon the laws of a foreign power."
True, the Court has read renvoi into § 1346(b)(1)'s words "in accordance with the law of." See Richards v. United States, 369 U.S. 1, 11 (1962) ("the [FTCA] ... requires application of the whole law of the State where the act or omission occurred" (emphasis added)).
In 1948, when the FTCA was enacted, it is also true, Congress reasonably might have anticipated that the then prevailing choice-of-law methodology, reflected in the Restatement (First) of Conflicts, would lead mechanically to the law of the place of injury. See Restatement (First) of Conflicts § 377 (1934) ("The place of wrong is in the state where the last event necessary to make an actor liable for an alleged tort takes place."); Richards, 369 U. S., at 11-12 ("The general conflict-of-laws rule, followed by a vast majority of the States, [wa]s to apply the law of the place of injury to the substantive rights of the parties." (footnote omitted)); ante, at 705-707, 708, n. 5 (same). Generally, albeit not always, the place where the negligent or intentional act or omission takes place coincides with the place of injury.
The Ninth Circuit concluded that the foreign-country exception did not bar Alvarez's false-arrest claim because that claim "involve[d] federal employees working from offices in the United States to guide and supervise actions in other countries." 331 F. 3d, at 638. In so holding, the Court of Appeals applied a "`headquarters doctrine,'" whereby "a claim can still proceed ... if harm occurring in a foreign country was proximately caused by acts in the United States." Ibid.
There is good reason to resist the headquarters doctrine described and relied upon by the Ninth Circuit. The Court of Appeals' employment of that doctrine renders the FTCA's foreign-country exception inapplicable whenever some authorization, support, or planning takes place in the United States. But "it will virtually always be possible to assert that the negligent [or intentional] activity that injured the plaintiff was the consequence of faulty training, selection or supervision—or even less than that, lack of careful training, selection or supervision—in the United States." Beattie, 756 F. 2d, at 119 (Scalia, J., dissenting); see ante, at 702-703 (same). Hence the headquarters doctrine, which considers whether steps toward the commission of the tort occurred within the United States, risks swallowing up the foreign-country exception.
Furthermore, the Court of Appeals failed to address the choice-of-law question implicated by both §§ 1346(b) and 2680(k) whenever tortious acts are committed in multiple states. Both those provisions direct federal courts "in multistate tort actions, to look in the first instance to the law of the place where the acts of negligence [or the intentional tort] took place." Richards, 369 U. S., at 10. In cases involving acts or omissions in several states, the question is which acts count. "Neither the text of the FTCA nor Richards provides any guidance ... when the alleged acts or omissions occur in more than one state. Moreover, the legislative
Courts of appeals have adopted varying approaches to this question. See Simon v. United States, 341 F.3d 193, 202 (CA3 2003) (listing five different choice-of-law methodologies for § 1346(b)(1)); Gould Electronics, 220 F. 3d, at 181-183 (same).
A "last significant act or omission" rule applied under § 2680(k) would close the door to the headquarters doctrine as applied by the Ninth Circuit in this litigation. By directing attention to the place where the last significant act or omission occurred, rather than to a United States location where some authorization, support, or planning may have taken place, the clear rule advanced by Judge Becker preserves § 2680(k) as the genuine limitation Congress intended it to be.
The "last significant act or omission" rule works in this litigation to identify Mexico, not California, as the place where the instant controversy arose. I would apply that rule here to hold that Alvarez's tort claim for false arrest under the FTCA is barred under the foreign-country exception.
Accordingly, I concur in the Court's judgment and concur in Parts I, III, and IV of its opinion.
JUSTICE BREYER, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I join JUSTICE GINSBURG'S concurrence and join the Court's opinion in respect to the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) claim. The Court says that to qualify for recognition under the ATS a norm of international law must have a content as definite as, and an acceptance as widespread as, those that characterized 18th-century international norms prohibiting piracy. Ante, at 732. The norm must extend liability to the type of perpetrator (e. g., a private actor) the plaintiff seeks to sue. Ante, at 732, n. 20. And Congress can make clear that courts should not recognize any such norm, through a direct or indirect command or by occupying the field. See ante, at 731. The Court also suggests that principles of exhaustion might apply, and that courts should give "serious weight" to the Executive Branch's view of the impact on foreign
I would add one further consideration. Since enforcement of an international norm by one nation's courts implies that other nations' courts may do the same, I would ask whether the exercise of jurisdiction under the ATS is consistent with those notions of comity that lead each nation to respect the sovereign rights of other nations by limiting the reach of its laws and their enforcement. In applying those principles, courts help ensure that "the potentially conflicting laws of different nations" will "work together in harmony," a matter of increasing importance in an ever more interdependent world. F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd v. Empagran S. A., ante, at 164; cf. Murray v. Schooner Charming Betsy, 2 Cranch 64, 118 (1804). Such consideration is necessary to ensure that ATS litigation does not undermine the very harmony that it was intended to promote. See ante, at 715-718.
These comity concerns normally do not arise (or at least are mitigated) if the conduct in question takes place in the country that provides the cause of action or if that conduct involves that country's own national—where, say, an American assaults a foreign diplomat and the diplomat brings suit in an American court. See Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law of the United States §§ 402(1), (2) (1986) (hereinafter Restatement) (describing traditional bases of territorial and nationality jurisdiction). They do arise, however, when foreign persons injured abroad bring suit in the United States under the ATS, asking the courts to recognize a claim that a certain kind of foreign conduct violates an international norm.
Since different courts in different nations will not necessarily apply even similar substantive laws similarly, workable harmony, in practice, depends upon more than substantive uniformity among the laws of those nations. That is to say, substantive uniformity does not automatically mean
Today international law will sometimes similarly reflect not only substantive agreement as to certain universally condemned behavior but also procedural agreement that universal jurisdiction exists to prosecute a subset of that behavior. See Restatement § 404, and Comment a; International Law Association, Final Report on the Exercise of Universal Jurisdiction in Respect of Gross Human Rights Offences 2 (2000). That subset includes torture, genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. See id., at 5-8; see also, e.g., Prosecutor v. Furundzija, Case No. IT-95-17/1-T, ¶¶ 155-156 (International Tribunal for Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in Territory of Former Yugoslavia Since 1991, Dec. 10, 1998); Attorney Gen. of Israel v. Eichmann, 36 I. L. R. 277 (Sup. Ct. Israel 1962).
The fact that this procedural consensus exists suggests that recognition of universal jurisdiction in respect to a limited set of norms is consistent with principles of international comity. That is, allowing every nation's courts to adjudicate foreign conduct involving foreign parties in such cases will not significantly threaten the practical harmony that comity principles seek to protect. That consensus concerns criminal jurisdiction, but consensus as to universal criminal jurisdiction itself suggests that universal tort jurisdiction would be no more threatening. Cf. Restatement § 404, Comment b. That is because the criminal courts of many nations combine civil and criminal proceedings, allowing those injured
Taking these matters into account, as I believe courts should, I can find no similar procedural consensus supporting the exercise of jurisdiction in these cases. That lack of consensus provides additional support for the Court's conclusion that the ATS does not recognize the claim at issue here— where the underlying substantive claim concerns arbitrary arrest, outside the United States, of a citizen of one foreign country by another.
FootNotes
Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance in No. 03-339 were filed for Alien Friends Representing Hungarian Jews and Bougainvilleans Interests by Steve W. Berman, R. Brent Walton, Jonathan W. Cuneo, David W. Stanley, Michael Waldman, and Samuel J. Dubbin; for Amnesty International et al. by Beth Stephens; for the Center for Justice and Accountability et al. by Laurel E. Fletcher, Peter Weiss, and Jennifer Green; for the Center for Women Policy Studies et al. by Rhonda Copelon; for the Presbyterian Church of Sudan et al. by Carey R. D'Avino, Stephen A. Whinston, and Lawrence Kill; for the World Jewish Congress et al. by Bill Lann Lee, Stanley M. Chesley, Paul De Marco, Burt Neuborne, and Michael D. Hausfeld; for Wendy A. Adams et al. by William J. Aceves and David S. Weissbrodt; and for Mary Robinson et al. by Harold Hongju Koh, John M. Townsend, and William R. Stein.
Briefs of amici curiae were filed in No. 03-339 for the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia et al. by Donald I. Baker and W. Todd Miller; for the International Labor Rights Fund et al. by Terrence P. Collingsworth and Natacha Thys; for the European Commission by Jeffrey P. Cunard; for James Akins et al. by Thomas E. Bishop; for Vikram Amar et al. by Nicholas W. van Aelstyn; and for Barry Amundsen et al. by Penny M. Venetis.
The Congress could only pass resolutions, one approving the state-court proceedings, 27 Journals of the Continental Congress 503, another directing the Secretary of Foreign Affairs to apologize and to "explain to Mr. De Marbois the difficulties that may arise . . . from the nature of a federal union," 28 id., at 314, and to explain to the representative of Louis XVI that "many allowances are to be made for" the young Nation, ibid.
Another possible limitation that we need not apply here is a policy of case-specific deference to the political branches. For example, there are now pending in federal district court several class actions seeking damages from various corporations alleged to have participated in, or abetted, the regime of apartheid that formerly controlled South Africa. See In re South African Apartheid Litigation, 238 F.Supp.2d 1379 (JPML 2002) (granting a motion to transfer the cases to the Southern District of New York). The Government of South Africa has said that these cases interfere with the policy embodied by its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which "deliberately avoided a `victors' justice' approach to the crimes of apartheid and chose instead one based on confession and absolution, informed by the principles of reconciliation, reconstruction, reparation and goodwill." Declaration of Penuell Mpapa Maduna, Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, Republic of South Africa, reprinted in App. to Brief for Government of Commonwealth of Australia et al. as Amici Curiae 7a, ¶ 3.2.1 (emphasis deleted). The United States has agreed. See Letter of William H. Taft IV, Legal Adviser, Dept. of State, to Shannen W. Coffin, Deputy Asst. Atty. Gen., Oct. 27, 2003, reprinted in id., at 2a. In such cases, there is a strong argument that federal courts should give serious weight to the Executive Branch's view of the case's impact on foreign policy. Cf. Republic of Austria v. Altmann, 541 U.S. 677, 701-702 (2004) (discussing the State Department's use of statements of interest in cases involving the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, 28 U. S. C. § 1602 et seq.).
The lack of genuine continuity is thus demonstrated by the fact that today's opinion renders the ATS unnecessary for federal jurisdiction over (so-called) law-of-nations claims. If the law of nations can be transformed into federal law on the basis of (1) a provision that merely grants jurisdiction, combined with (2) some residual judicial power (from whence nobody knows) to create federal causes of action in cases implicating foreign relations, then a grant of federal-question jurisdiction would give rise to a power to create international-law-based federal common law just as effectively as would the ATS. This would mean that the ATS became largely superfluous as of 1875, when Congress granted general federal-question jurisdiction subject to a $500 amount-in-controversy requirement, Act of Mar. 3, 1875, § 1, 18 Stat. 470, and entirely superfluous as of 1980, when Congress eliminated the amount-in-controversy requirement, Pub. L. 96-486, 94 Stat. 2369.
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