When Terror Hits Abroad, Can Justice Follow It Home?
The Supreme Court will soon decide a case that sits at the volatile intersection of terrorism, foreign affairs, and constitutional limits on congressional power. In Fuld v. Palestinian Liberation Organization, the justices are weighing whether Congress went too far in trying to ensure that victims of terrorist attacks abroad can sue foreign perpetrators in U.S. courts. But behind the dense legal doctrines lies a bigger question: When it comes to foreign policy and national security, who decides?
At stake is the constitutionality of the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (PSJVTA), a 2019 law designed to hold the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) financially accountable for terror attacks that maimed or killed Americans in Israel. The law creates a kind of legal trigger: if the PLO or PA engage in certain conduct, like paying the families of convicted terrorists or conducting activities in the U.S., they are “deemed to have consented” to the jurisdiction of American courts.
The families of terror victims, including Miriam Fuld, the widow of Ari Fuld, an American stabbed to death outside a West Bank shopping mall, argue the statute is a necessary tool to deter future violence and deliver long-delayed justice. The Second Circuit struck the law down, ruling that Congress can’t declare a defendant has “consented” to U.S. jurisdiction unless that defendant received a “reciprocal benefit.” In other words, Congress can’t just say you’re subject to U.S. courts because you mailed a check or showed up in New York; there has to be a fair exchange to constitute “consent.”
The stakes are immense, not just for terror victims, but for the scope of U.S. power in an increasingly dangerous world. The PSJVTA is about more than compensation. It’s a signal that America won’t let its citizens be murdered abroad without consequence. A ruling striking it down would signal something else: that the courts, not Congress, get the final word on how jurisdiction is defined, and in this case, how U.S. foreign policy is enforced.
That tension was on full display during oral argument. The justices probed whether the “minimum contacts” test, a standard developed under the Fourteenth Amendment to limit state overreach, should apply to the federal government acting under the Fifth Amendment.
The broader context here matters. This isn’t the only front where the Justices are being asked to referee the boundaries of presidential and congressional power over foreign affairs. Immigration, tariffs, and even military funding are in legal limbo. This term or next, the Court will likely be asked whether the President can unilaterally reshape asylum policy, or impose sweeping tariffs in the name of national security. Fuld offers a preview of how the Court may handle those questions.
If the Court affirms the Second Circuit, it risks boxing in Congress at the precise moment when flexibility is most needed. Terror networks don’t observe borders. Justice doesn’t travel easily. And Congress, acting under its foreign affairs and national security powers, tailored the PSJVTA to give victims a chance at both.
If the Court reverses, it will reaffirm a long-standing principle: Congress sets the rules of engagement when the battlefield stretches across continents. As the Petitioners point out, the Founding generation understood that foreign threats require national, not state-level, solutions, and that the Fifth Amendment was never intended to tie Congress’s hands abroad the way the Fourteenth limits states at home.
Either way, Fuld v. PLO may soon be remembered not as a terrorism case, but as a constitutional watershed. It asks whether Congress can chart the course of American justice abroad, or whether due process now means letting terror financiers off the hook, so long as they keep their business across the ocean.