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Page Number: 13.0

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JAM v. INTERNATIONAL FINANCE CORP. 

Opinion of the Court 

agency documents that “would not be available by law to a 
party  . . .  in  litigation  with  the  agency”  incorporates  the
general  law  governing  attorney  work-product  privilege  as
it exists when the statute is applied.  FTC v. Grolier Inc., 
462 U. S. 19, 20, 26–27 (1983) (emphasis added); id., at 34, 
n. 6  (Brennan,  J.,  concurring  in  part  and  concurring  in
judgment).    Likewise,  a  general  reference  to  federal  dis-
covery rules incorporates those rules “as they are found on 
any given day, today included,” El Encanto, Inc. v. Hatch 
Chile  Co.,  825  F. 3d  1161,  1164  (CA10  2016),  and  a  gen-
eral reference to “the crime of piracy as defined by the law 
of nations” incorporates a definition of piracy “that changes
with  advancements  in  the  law  of  nations,”  United  States 
v. Dire, 680 F. 3d 446, 451, 467–469 (CA4 2012). 

The same logic applies here.  The IOIA’s reference to the 
immunity  enjoyed  by  foreign  governments  is  a  general
rather  than  specific  reference.    The  reference  is  to  an 
external  body  of  potentially  evolving  law—the  law  of 
foreign sovereign immunity—not to a specific provision of 
another statute.  The IOIA should therefore be understood 
to  link  the  law  of  international  organization  immunity  to
the  law  of  foreign  sovereign  immunity,  so  that  the  one 
develops in tandem with the other. 

The  IFC  contends  that  the  IOIA’s  reference  to  the  im-
munity  enjoyed  by  foreign  governments  is  not  a  general
reference to an external body of law, but is instead a spe-
cific  reference  to  a  common  law  concept  that  had  a  fixed 
meaning  when  the  IOIA  was  enacted  in  1945.  And  be-
cause  we  ordinarily  presume  that  “Congress  intends  to 
incorporate  the  well-settled  meaning  of  the  common-law
terms  it  uses,”  Neder  v.  United  States,  527  U. S.  1,  23 
(1999),  the  IFC  argues  that  we  should  read  the  IOIA  to 
incorporate  what  the  IFC  maintains  was  the  then-settled
meaning  of  the  “immunity  enjoyed  by  foreign  govern-
ments”: virtually absolute immunity.

But  in  1945,  the  “immunity  enjoyed  by  foreign  govern-