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12 JAM v. INTERNATIONAL FINANCE CORP.
Opinion of the Court
eign immunity. /bid.
We do not agree. The delegation provision is most
naturally read to allow the President to modify, on a
case-by-case basis, the immunity rules that would other-
wise apply to a particular international organization. The
statute authorizes the President to take action with re-
spect to a single organization—“any such organization” —
in light of the functions performed by “such organization.”
28 U.S.C. §288. The text suggests retail rather than
wholesale action, and that is in fact how authority under
§288 has been exercised in the past. See, e.g., Exec. Order
No. 12425, 3 CFR 198 (1984) (designating INTERPOL as
an international organization under the IOIA but with-
holding certain privileges and immunities); Exec. Order
No. 11718, 8 CFR 177 (1974) (same for INTELSAT). In
any event, the fact that the President has power to modify
otherwise applicable immunity rules is perfectly compati-
ble with the notion that those rules might themselves
change over time in light of developments in the law gov-
erning foreign sovereign immunity.
The D. C. Circuit in Atkinson also gave no consideration
to the opinion of the State Department, whose views in
this area ordinarily receive “special attention.” Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela v. Helmerich & Payne Int'l. Drilling
Co., 581 U.S. __, ___ (2017) (slip op., at 9). Shortly after
the FSIA was enacted, the State Department took the
position that the immunity rules of the IOIA and the FSIA
were now “link[ed].” Letter from Detlev F. Vagts, Office of
the Legal Adviser, to Robert M. Carswell, Jr., Senior Legal
Advisor, OAS, p.2 (Mar. 24, 1977). The Department
reaffirmed that view during subsequent administrations,
and it has reaffirmed it again here.2 That longstanding
2See Letter from Roberts B. Owen, Legal Adviser, to Leroy D. Clark,
Gen. Counsel, EEOC (June 24, 1980) in Nash, Contemporary Practice
of the United States Relating to International Law, 74 Am. J. Int'l. L. 917,
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| Filename | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028554.jpg |
| File Size | 0.0 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 85.0% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 2,050 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-04T17:04:15.292111 |
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