Diego A. Zambrano

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Volume 89.1
Foreign Dictators in U.S. Court
Diego A. Zambrano
Associate Professor, Stanford Law School.

This Article received an honorable mention in the national 2021 Association of American Law Schools Scholarly Papers Competition, awarded on a blind basis by a committee of established scholars. For thoughtful comments and conversations, I thank Pam Bookman, Curtis Bradley, John Coyle, William Dodge, Robin Effron, Maggie Gardner, Tom Ginsburg, Manuel Gómez, Aziz Huq, Erik Jensen, Chimène Keitner, Michael McConnell, David Sklansky, Beth Van Schaack, Allen Weiner, Ingrid Wuerth, and participants at the Junior International Law Scholars Association conference. I am most grateful to Mackenzie Austin and Chris Meyer for invaluable research assistance and also thank Alice Bishop, Nitisha Baronia, and Mathew Simkovits for their help.

The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, the court-created “act of state” doctrine, and other common-law immunities shield foreign officials and governments from most lawsuits. For instance, courts have dismissed claims against China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia over allegations of torture, detentions, and election interference. Yet foreign governments have unfettered access to U.S. courts as plaintiffs. And foreign dictatorships—including Russia, China, Turkey, and Venezuela—have leveraged this access to harass political dissidents, critics, and even newspapers in the United States. These doctrines create an asymmetry at the heart of this Article: foreign dictators and their proxies can access our courts as plaintiffs to harass their opponents, but their regimes are, in turn, immune from lawsuits here. This Article exposes that asymmetry and argues that U.S. courts and Congress should make it harder for foreign dictators to abuse our legal system.

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86.8
Federal Expansion and the Decay of State Courts
Diego A. Zambrano
Assistant Professor of Law, Stanford Law School

For thoughtful comments and conversations, I thank Greg Ablavsky, Robert Bone, Adam Chilton, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, David Freeman Engstrom, Richard Epstein, Eric Fish, Nora Freeman Engstrom, Jacob Goldin, Alexandra Lahav, Hiba Hafiz, Deborah Hensler, Daniel E. Ho, David Hoffman, William Hubbard, Samuel Issacharoff, Emma Kaufman, Amalia Kessler, Dan Klerman, Jonathan Masur, Michael McConnell, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Saul Levmore, Jim Pfander, Bill Rubenstein, Joanna Schwartz, Catherine M. Sharkey, Shirin Sinnar, Norm Spaulding, Alan Trammell, Adam Zimmerman, and the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review. I also thank participants at the Annual Civil Procedure Workshop and the Clifford Symposium.

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