The End of Immunity?

In June of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court held that, despite the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), investigators could conduct post-judgment discovery into the Republic of Argentina’s assets outside the United States. To justify this decision, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote an overview of the FSIA’s history: In 1976, he explained, Congress replaced the “old executive-driven, factor-intensive, loosely common-law-based immunity regime” with the FSIA. He noted that the “key word” here was “comprehensive”—meaning that “any sort of immunity defense made by a foreign sovereign in an American court must stand on the Act’s text. Or it