Alperin V. Vatican Bank - Legal Analysis

Legal Analysis

The initial dismissal of the case on the political question doctrine was an extension of the precedent in Baker v. Carr. According to Prof. Gwynne Skinner, "most of the claims arising out of the Holocaust have been dismissed based on this doctrine either because decisions were already made regarding reparations, or because the allied forces had already made decisions about who would be prosecuted for the various crimes committed during the Holocaust". According to Prof. Hannibal Travis: "Initially, U.S. courts dismissed claims by Holocaust survivors on the grounds that international law only gave rise to claims between states and was not self-executing in the absence of implementing legislation in Congress. This erroneous interpretation of §1350 was corrected within a few years, and since 1980, the U.S. federal courts have exercised universal jurisdiction in a nearly unbroken line of cases involving offenses properly alleged to have been committed elsewhere in violation of international law."

The case has been compared to several other 2003 lawsuits against private actors for wrongs committed during World War II, such as Anderman v. Federal Republic of Austria (also determined to be a political question). It has been cited as an example of an Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) case where the courts did not require the exhaustion of foreign legal remedies. It has also been cited as one of several "recent decisions applying, interpreting, and sometimes struggling with the Sosa decision's ATS approach". The Ninth Circuit decision has been criticized on the grounds that: "while the court's demarcation between property claims and war objectives claims may be a sound analytical method for addressing political question doctrine issues, the slave labor claims should not have been excluded from the scope of the property claims".

The plaintiffs attempted to coordinate with pending Catholic sex abuse cases to "avoid divergent findings on the issue of Vatican amenability to suit in the United States." The precedent from the 2005 appellate court ruling has already been applied in Mujica v. Occidental Petroleum Corporation.