Ingrid (Wuerth) Brunk is the Helen Strong Curry Professor of International Law at Vanderbilt Law School, where she also directs the international legal studies program. She is a leading scholar of foreign affairs, public international law and international litigation. She serves on the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Public International Law, she is a Reporter on the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) on U.S. Foreign Relations Law, and she is on the editorial board of the American Journal of International Law. She has won Fulbright and Alexander von Humboldt awards permitting her to spend substantial time in Germany and she is an elected member of the German Society of International Law.
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The problems—legal and political—with using the doctrine of countermeasures to confiscate Russian central bank assets have been understated by everyone.
The Supreme Court remanded Halkbank, and the lower court must now consider whether the common law provides immunity from prosecution to foreign state-owned enterprises.
International law and U.S. foreign policy provide powerful reasons to require clearer direction from the political branches before ordering the turnover of Afghan central bank assets to U.S. judgment creditors.
The relationship between foreign sovereign immunity and sanctions against central banks is important but often mischaracterized.
Now is the time for a narrower, more focused international legal order dedicated to a strong core of sovereignty-protecting norms that preserve the territorial status quo and promote international peace and cooperation.
An important case before the en banc Fifth Circuit will consider the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause and personal jurisdiction, an issue that the Supreme Court has not addressed and one with broad significance for transnational litigation in U.S. courts.
Conventional wisdom and many lower court cases hold that foreign states are not entitled to constitutionally based personal jurisdiction protections in federal courts because they are not “persons” protected by the Fifth Amendment. That reasoning is incorrect as a matter of constitutional text and history, and it leads to poor results as a matter of policy for reasons explored at length in a forthcoming article and summarized here.