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FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY v. PHILIPP 

Syllabus 

(a) The heirs contend that their claims fall within the FSIA’s excep-
tion  for  cases  involving  “property  taken  in  violation  of  international 
law,” §1605(a)(3)—a provision known as the expropriation exception—
because the forced sale of the Welfenschatz constituted an act of geno-
cide,  and  genocide  is  a  violation  of  international  human  rights  law. 
Germany argues that the relevant international law is not the law of 
genocide but the international law of expropriation, under which a for-
eign sovereign’s taking of its own nationals’ property remains a domes-
tic affair.  Pp. 4–13. 

(1) The “domestic takings rule” invoked by Germany derives from
the  premise  that  international  law  customarily  concerns  relations 
among states, not between states and individuals.  Historically, a sov-
ereign’s  taking  of  a  foreign  national’s  property  implicated  interna-
tional law because it constituted an injury to the state of the alien’s 
nationality.  A domestic taking, by contrast, did not interfere with re-
lations among states.  This domestic takings rule endured even as a 
growing body of human rights law made states’ treatment of individual
human beings a matter of international concern.  And those who criti-
cized the treatment of property rights under international law did so
on  the  ground  that  all  sovereign  takings,  not  just  domestic  takings, 
were outside the scope of that law.  This dispute over the existence of 
international law constraints on sovereign takings eventually reached 
the Court in Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino, 376 U. S. 398, 436. 
Hesitant to delve into this controversy, the Court instead invoked the 
act of state doctrine.  In response, Congress passed the Second Hick-
enlooper Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1964, which pro-
hibits  United  States  courts  from  applying  the  act  of  state  doctrine
where a “right[ ] to property is asserted” based upon a “taking . . . by 
an act of that state in violation of . . . international law.”  22 U. S. C. 
§2370(e)(2).  Courts and commentators understood the Amendment to 
permit  adjudication  of  claims  Sabbatino  had  avoided  deciding,  i.e., 
claims  against  other  countries  for  expropriation  of  American-owned 
property.  But nothing in the Amendment purported to alter any rule 
of  international  law,  including  the  domestic  takings  rule.    Congress 
used nearly identical language when it crafted the FSIA’s expropria-
tion exception twelve years later.  Based on this historical and legal 
background, courts reached a “consensus”  that the expropriation ex-
ception’s  “reference  to  ‘violation  of  international  law’  does  not  cover 
expropriations of property belonging to a country’s own nationals.”  Re-
public of Austria v. Altmann, 541 U. S. 677, 713 (BREYER, J., concur-
ring).  Pp. 5–8.

(2) The heirs concede that the international law of expropriation 
retained the domestic takings rule at the time of the FSIA’s enactment, 
but  they  read  “rights  in  property  taken  in  violation  of  international