Professor Dodge Quoted in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act

Professor William S. Dodge was quoted in The Philadelphia Inquirer on the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).  Some experts have questioned whether foreign governments will retaliate against the law, which makes it easier for U.S. citizens to sue foreign governments for terrorist acts, by amending their own sovereign immunity laws to make it easier to sue U.S. interests.

Professor Dodge said there is nothing in international law establishing state immunity from legal claims for acts of terrorism. The Inquirer quoted from Professor Dodge’s essay “Does JASTA Violate International Law?” in noting that "A terrorism exception has been part of U.S. law since 1996 and part of Canadian law since 2012, and neither exception, to my knowledge, has provoked the sort of widespread protests from other nations that one might expect in the case of a clear violation of customary international law."

Professor Dodge, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, is an influential international law scholar. He serves as a Co-Reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law: Jurisdiction and as a member of the State Department's Advisory Committee on International Law. He is a co-author of the casebook Transnational Business Problems and a co-editor of International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change, which won the American Society of International Law's 2012 certificate of merit. He has authored more than 50 other publications in books and law reviews.