CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AND FIFTH AMENDMENT – JURISDICTION

uld v Palestine Liberation Organization, et al., 606 U.S. (June 20, 2025) Roberts, Justice
Congress passed the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act in 2019. The Act deems the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority—if they engage in specified conduct—to have consented to personal jurisdiction in civil suits brought in the United States under the Antiterrorism Act. The question presented is whether this personal jurisdiction provision violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
The ATA supplied the underlying cause of action in both lawsuits now before us. The first was brought by a group of American citizens (and their estates and survivors) injured in terror attacks in Israel. It was filed in 2004 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. See Sokolow v. Palestine Liberation Org., The case went to trial, and in 2015 a jury found respondents liable under the ATA. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $218.5 million in damages, which was trebled to $655.5 million.
That victory was short lived. The next year, the Second Circuit vacated the District Court’s judgment and directed dismissal for lack of personal jurisdiction. Respondents were not subject to jurisdiction, the Court of Appeals held, because the complained of “killings and related acts of terrorism . . . were unconnected to he forum and were not expressly aimed at the United States.” 835 F.3d 317, 337
(2016); accord, Livnat v. Palestinian Auth., 851 F.3d 45, 57–58 (CADC 2017).
Congress responded by enacting the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act of 2018 (ATCA), 132Stat. 3183. The ATCA added a new provision to the ATA, which deemed defendants “to have consented to personal jurisdiction” if they engaged in certain activities in the United States or accepted particular forms of U. S. foreign assistance. See §4(a), id., at 3184. The Sokolow plaintiffs moved for the Second Circuit to recall its mandate in light of the ATCA. The Court of Appeals declined to do so, 925 F.3d 570, 574–576 (2019), and the plaintiffs filed a petition for a writ of certiorari in this Court. Sokolow v. Palestine Liberation Org.
While the Sokolow certiorari petition was pending, the landscape changed again—this time, through Congress’s enactment in December 2019 of the law at issue here: the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (PSJVTA), §903, 133Stat. 3082–3085, 18 U. S. C. §§2333, 2334. Section 903(c) of the PSJVTA, subtitled “Jurisdictional Amendments to Facilitate Resolution of Terrorism-Related Claims of Nationals of the United States,” superseded the ATCA’s jurisdictional provisions. 133Stat. 3083. Under the PSJVTA’s now operative provision, which refers to the PA and PLO by name, respondents “shall be deemed to have consented to personal jurisdiction” in ATA cases in two specified circumstances. §§2334(e)(1), (5).
The PSJVTA’s second predicate ties jurisdiction to respondents’ activities on U. S. soil. The PLO and PA are deemed to have consented to personal jurisdiction if, after a specified period, either “continues to maintain,” “establishes[,] or procures any office, headquarters, premises, or other facilities or establishments in the United States,” or otherwise “conducts any activity while physically present in the United States.” §2334(e)(1)(B). The statute expressly excludes respondents’ United Nations mission and its ancillary activities. §2334(e)(3).
Given this legislative development, we granted the Sokolow plaintiffs’ pending certiorari petition, vacated the judgment of the Second Circuit, and remanded for
“further consideration in light of the [PSJVTA].” 590 U. S. ___ (2020). A few days after our remand, a different set of plaintiffs—the family of an American citizen stabbed in a 2018 attack in the West Bank—sued respondents under the ATA in the Southern District of New York, and invoked the PSJVTA as the basis for personal jurisdiction. See Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Org.
We granted certiorari to decide whether the PSJVTA violates the Fifth Amendment. 604 U. S. ___ (2024).
Our current framework for assessing personal jurisdiction under the Fourteenth Amendment derives from International Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310 (1945). Under that framework, “a tribunal’s authority” over a defendant “depends on the defendant’s having such ‘contacts’ with the forum State that ‘the maintenance of the suit’ is ‘reasonable, in the context of our federal system of government,’ and
‘does not offend traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice.’ ” Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial Dist. Court, 592 U.S. 351, 358 (2021)
(quoting International Shoe, 326 U. S., at 316–317).
Given the distinct territorial reach of the Federal Government’s sovereign power, it makes little sense to mechanically import the limitations that the Fourteenth Amendment imposes on the authority of state courts, which is restricted consonant with the States’ more constrained sovereign spheres. See Burnet, 288 U. S., at 401. Indeed, when evaluating state court jurisdiction under the Fourteenth Amendment, we have emphasized that “personal jurisdiction requires” a “sovereign-by-sovereign . . . analysis.” Nicastro, 564 U. S., at 884 (plurality opinion). And we have acknowledged the straightforward premise that “the United States is a distinct sovereign.” Ibid. That distinction makes a difference.
Accordingly, to the extent that the Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments both implicitly limit the jurisdictional authority of courts, they do so with respect to the distinct sovereignties from which those courts derive their authority. Because the State and Federal Governments occupy categorically different sovereign spheres, we decline to import the Fourteenth Amendment minimum contacts standard into the Fifth Amendment. Rather, the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment necessarily permits a more flexible jurisdictional inquiry commensurate with the Federal Government’s broader sovereign authority.
Although we hold today that the Fifth Amendment does not impose the same jurisdictional limitations as the Fourteenth, we do not purport to delineate the outer bounds of the Federal Government’s power, consistent with due process, to hale foreign defendants into U. S. courts. On this score, the private petitioners argue that the Fifth Amendment imposes no territorial limits on personal jurisdiction. The United States, however, asks us not to embrace—at least for now—this maximalist theory of federal jurisdiction. The Government cautions that the heory is “not easily confirmed as a historical matter,” and points to “strong policy reasons . . . against reaching” it, including the possibility that other nations might respond in kind by haling Americans into their courts under expansive theories of jurisdiction.
We agree with the Government that we need not address the private petitioners’ unbounded jurisdictional theory today. The PSJVTA ties federal jurisdiction to conduct closely related to the United States that implicates important foreign policy concerns. We are wary to reach further and bless more attenuated assertions of jurisdiction when the cases before us do not require doing so. Cf. Asahi Metal Industry Co. v. Superior Court of Cal., Solano Cty., 480 U.S. 102, 115 (1987) (“Great care and reserve should be exercised when extending our notions of personal jurisdiction into the international field.” (quoting United States v. First Nat. City Bank, 379 U.S. 378, 404 (1965) (Harlan, J., dissenting))). It is sufficient unto the day that, whatever the Fifth Amendment’s outer limits on the territorial jurisdiction of federal courts, the PSJVTA does not transgress them.
We need not separately consider whether the statute comports with our cases addressing the circumstances under which a defendant may be deemed, consistent with due process, to have consented to jurisdiction. See, e.g., Mallory v. Norfolk Southern R. Co., 600 U.S. 122 (2023). Respondents’ consent-based arguments rest on the premise that Congress could not in the PSJVTA “transform constitutionally-insufficient conduct overseas into grounds for ‘deemed consent’ to personal jurisdiction in the United States.” The Court of Appeals thought similarly. See 82 F. 4th, at 91. Since we hold that the statute ties the assertion of jurisdiction to predicate conduct that in and of itself bears a meaningful relationship to the United States, we need not further consider the matter through the lens of consent.
Although we have already made clear that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment does not incorporate the Fourteenth Amendment minimum contacts standard, the prospect remains that the Fifth Amendment might entail a similar
“inquiry into the reasonableness of the assertion of jurisdiction in the particular case.” Asahi, 480 U. S., at 115. We need not determine whether such analysis is constitutionally required because, even if it were, the PSVJTA easily comports with the factors we have previously applied to determine “the reasonableness of the exercise of jurisdiction” even under the Fourteenth Amendment. Id., at 113. Reasonableness, we have explained, will depend in each case “on an evaluation of several factors,” including “the burden on the defendant, the interests of the forum State, and the plaintiff ’s interest in obtaining relief.” Ibid. The PSJVTA ticks all three boxes.
For largely the same reasons that we conclude there is a close connection between the PSJVTA’s predicate conduct and the United States, it follows that the forum sovereign has a substantial interest in adjudicating the dispute. We will not belabor that the Federal Government has an exceedingly compelling interest, as part of its comprehensive efforts to deter international terrorism, in providing a forum for American victims to hold the perpetrators of such acts accountable. For similar reasons, American plaintiffs have a strong interest in seeking justice through an ATA damages action in U. S. courts. Cf. Ford Motor Co., 592 U. S., at 368 (recognizing the “significant interests” of a forum State in “providing [its] residents with a convenient forum for redressing injuries inflicted by out-of-state actors” (internal quotation marks omitted)).
The PSJVTA reasonably ties the assertion of federal jurisdiction over the PLO and PA to conduct that involves the United States and implicates sensitive foreign policy matters within the prerogative of the political branches. We hold that the statute’s provision for personal jurisdiction comports with the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
The judgments of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit are reversed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.