Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-351_o7jp.pdf
Page Number: 9.0

Cite as:  592 U. S. ____ (2021) 

5 

Opinion of the Court 

Venezuela v. Helmerich & Payne Int’l Drilling Co., 581 U. S. 
___, ___ (2017) (slip op., at 10) (citing Restatement (Third) 
of Foreign Relations Law of the United States §712 (1986) 
(Restatement (Third))). 

A 
Known at the founding as the “law of nations,” what we 
now refer to as international law customarily concerns re-
lations  among  sovereign  states,  not  relations  between
states and individuals.  See Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sab-
batino, 376 U. S. 398, 422 (1964) (“The traditional view of 
international law is that it establishes substantive princi-
ples for determining whether one country has wronged an-
other.”).

The  domestic  takings  rule  invoked  by  Germany  derives
from  this  premise.  Historically,  a  sovereign’s  taking  of  a 
foreigner’s  property,  like  any  injury  of  a  foreign  national, 
implicated  the  international  legal  system  because  it  “con-
stituted  an  injury  to  the  state  of  the  alien’s  nationality.” 
Bradley  &  Goldsmith,  Customary  International  Law  as 
Federal Common Law: A Critique of the Modern Position, 
110 Harv. L. Rev. 815, 831, n. 106 (1997); see S. Friedman, 
Expropriation  in  International  Law  5,  139  (1953).    Such 
mistreatment was an affront to the sovereign, and “there-
fore the alien’s state alone, and not the individual, could in-
voke the remedies of international law.”  Bradley, supra, at 
831, n. 106.  A domestic taking by contrast did not interfere 
with relations among states.  See E. de Vattel, 3 The Law 
of Nations §81, p. 138 (C. Fenwick transl. 1916) (“Even the
property of individuals, taken as a whole, is to be regarded
as  the  property  of  the  Nation  with  respect  to  other  Na-
tions.”);  see  also  United  States  v.  Belmont,  301  U. S.  324, 
332 (1937) (“What another country has done in the way of 
taking over property of its nationals . . . is not a matter for 
judicial consideration here.”).