In 2019, Congress enacted the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (PSJVTA), which created jurisdiction over the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for terrorism-related lawsuits in U.S. courts, even when the act of terrorism occurred outside the United States. In the first case brought under PSJVTA, the widow of Israeli-American Ari Fuld, who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian teenager in 2018, brought a damages action against the PA and PLO in federal court in New York. Both the trial court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the exercise of jurisdiction over the PA and PLO under the PSJVTA was unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
In a unanimous decision, however, the U.S. Supreme Court has now overturned those decisions and ruled that exercising jurisdiction over the PA and PLO pursuant to the PSJVTA does not violate the Due Process Clause. The case, Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization, 2025 WL 1716140 (U.S. June 20, 2025), breaks new ground, not only in making the PA and PLO subject to damages actions brought by American victims of Palestinian terror in U.S. courts, but also in ruling that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment does not limit Congress from creating jurisdiction to the same extent that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits the exercise of personal jurisdiction in state courts.
The case arose from the 2018 stabbing of Ari Fuld, a father of four, as he was standing outside a supermarket near the Gush Etzion Junction, about a 30-minute drive south of Jerusalem. A Palestinian teenager attacked Fuld and stabbed him multiple times in the back and neck. After he was stabbed, Fuld pursued and shot his assailant, who was attempting to attack a nearby shop employee. Fuld then collapsed and was rushed to a hospital where he died from his wounds.
The teenage assailant was tried and convicted in Israel and sentenced to life in prison. Fuld’s widow, Miriam Fuld, sued the PA and the PLO in federal court in New York under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1990 (ATA), which creates a federal civil damages action for U.S. nationals injured or killed by reason of an act of international terrorism. Fuld argued that the court had jurisdiction over the PA and PLO under the recently enacted PSJVTA, which provides that the PA and PLO shall be deemed to have consented to jurisdiction in the United States under two circumstances: (i) if they continued their “pay to slay” practice of paying salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons and to families of deceased terrorists, or (ii) if they maintained or established offices or other facilities in the United States other than their United Nations mission and its ancillary activities.
Despite those two jurisdictional predicates under the PSJVTA having been met, and despite finding that the murder of Fuld was “unquestionably horrific,” the trial court in the Southern District of New York ruled that exercising jurisdiction over the PA and PLO in these circumstances was a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agreed and affirmed the district court’s dismissal of the case.
The Supreme Court, however, unanimously disagreed. In an opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts dealing with both the Fuld case and a similar case in which a federal jury had found the PA and PLO responsible for 11 deadly terror attacks during the Second Intifada and awarded $218.5 million in damages (the Sokolow case), the Court first noted that it had never before ruled on the issue of whether the Fifth Amendment imposes the same restrictions on the exercise of jurisdiction by a federal court that the Fourteenth Amendment imposes on state courts. The Court ruled that “the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment necessarily permits a more flexible jurisdictional inquiry commensurate with the Federal Government’s broader sovereign authority.” The Court declined to rule on whether the Fifth Amendment imposes no territorial limits on personal jurisdiction, as the plaintiffs argued, but ruled that “whatever the Fifth Amendment’s outer limits on the territorial jurisdiction of the federal courts, the PSJVTA does not transgress them.”
The Court noted that, in passing and signing the PSJVTA into law, Congress and the President “made a considered judgment to subject the PLO and PA to liability in U.S. courts as part of a comprehensive legal response to ‘halt, deter, and disrupt’ acts of international terrorism that threaten the life and limb of American citizens. It also noted that the statute applies only to ATA cases, a narrow category of claims that provide civil remedies only for Americans injured by acts of international terrorism. The Court ruled that, “[f]ar from an anything-goes approach . . . the PSJVTA ties jurisdiction to specific and narrow conduct that directly implicates issues of sensitive and ongoing concern in respondents’ relationships with the United States.”
In a concurring opinion joined by Justice Gorsuch, Justice Thomas agreed with the judgment of the majority but said he would have taken a different approach. As an initial matter, he said that he was “skeptical” that entities such as the PA and PLO—foreign bodies that are not recognized as sovereigns by the United States but that nevertheless carry out government functions —enjoy any constitutional rights at all, let alone qualify as “persons” for purposes of the Fifth Amendment. He did not reach a conclusion on that issue, however, because none of the parties had raised it. He went on to say, however, that he would have ruled that the Fifth Amendment does not impose any constraint on Congress’ ability to extend federal jurisdiction, a position, he said, that “respects the Constitution’s design by reserving matters of foreign affairs to the political branches.” Both the Fuld case and the Sokolow case will now be remanded to the lower courts for further proceedings.
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