Civil procedure students are used to hearing about the rules for state-court personal jurisdiction under the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. But the Fifth Amendment has a Due Process Clause too. So what limits does it impose, if any, on federal-court jurisdiction? That question has been left open for more than two hundred years (at least in Supreme Court case law), but it's coming up for argument this term.
In Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Org., currently set for argument on April 1, the Court is considering the constitutionality of several antiterrorism statutes passed by Congress to punish attacks on Americans. These statutes let American victims and their families sue the responsible parties in American courts, even if the terrorist attacks occurred abroad and weren't focused on American targets. (These statutes were inspired by the 1985 attack on the Achille Lauro, in which Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew, was shot and dumped from his wheelchair into the sea; his family then faced various hurdles in holding the guilty parties accountable.)
In one suit now before the Court, the families of the American victims obtained significant judgments against the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority for sponsoring terrorist attacks in Israel and then rewarding the perpetrators. The Second Circuit ordered the cases dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, holding Congress's statutes unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment, and the Supreme Court granted cert.
