The Atlantic – Peter Charles Choharis : The Cold War and How We Think About Private Property
This post is part of a 12-part series exploring how the U.S.-Russia relationship has shaped the world since the December 1991 end of the Soviet Union. Read the full series here.
Source: The Atlantic, 24th Dec 2011
ASP Adjunct Fellow Peter Charles Choharis is a featured author.
Seventeen months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in an opinion, “There are few if any issues in international law today on which opinion seems to be so divided as the limitations on a state’s power to expropriate the property of aliens.” The Court was considering a case involving the Fidel Castro government’s nationalization of American-owned private property. But based in part on this uncertainty about international legal protections for foreign investments, the Court held that U.S. courts should not judge the legality of a foreign government’s official acts and did not reach the merits of the case.
Ironically, the courts of the world’s largest economy have done little to help. Despite the fact that there are few issues in international law on which opinion is so unified today, U.S. courts are still mired in Cold War doctrines that prevent them from hearing claims about injuries to foreign investments by state actors. And an increasing number of American judges are openly skeptical about the relevance of international law to U.S. jurisprudence.
This article is available online.
