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Page Number: 65.0

8 

JESNER v. ARAB BANK, PLC 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

2 

The  plurality  briefly  acknowledges  this  critique  of  its 

reading  of  footnote  20,  but  nonetheless  assumes  the  cor­
rectness  of  its  approach  because  of  its  view  that  there
exists a “distinction in international law between corpora­
tions  and  natural  persons.”    Ante,  at  17.  The  plurality
attempts  to  substantiate  this  proposition  by  pointing  to
the  charters  of  certain  international  criminal  tribunals 
and noting that none was given jurisdiction over corporate 
defendants.  That  argument,  however,  confuses  the  sub­
stance of international law with how it has been enforced 
in particular contexts.

Again,  the  question  of  who  must  undertake  the  prohib­
ited conduct for there to be a violation of an international-
law norm is one of international law, but how a particular
actor  is  held  liable  for  a  given  law-of-nations  violation
generally is a question of enforcement left up to individual 
states.  Sometimes,  states  act  collectively  and  establish
international tribunals to punish certain international-law
violations.  Each  such  tribunal  is  individually  negotiated,
and  the  limitations  placed  on  its  jurisdiction  are  typi- 
cally  driven  by  strategic  considerations  and  resource
constraints. 

For example, the Allies elected not to prosecute corpora­
tions  at  Nuremberg  because  of  pragmatic  factors.  Those 
factors  included  scarce  judicial  resources,  a  preference  of
the occupation governments to swiftly dismantle the most 
culpable  German  companies  without  destroying  Germa­
ny’s  postwar  economy,  and  a  desire  to  focus  on  establish­
ing  the  principle  of  nonstate  criminal  responsibility  for 
human-rights  violations.    See  Brief  for  Nuremberg  Schol­
ars as Amici Curiae 4, 11–13. 

More recently, the delegations that negotiated the Rome
Statute  of  the  International  Criminal  Court  in  the  1990’s 
elected  not  to  extend  that  tribunal’s  jurisdiction  to  corpo­
rations in part because states had varying domestic prac­