Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Corporación Cimex, S. A. (Cuba)

Majority reasoning

The majority held that four features of the Helms-Burton Act, taken together, make it clear that Congress eliminated the foreign sovereign immunity of Cuban government companies. First, the Act's cause of action (the legal right to sue) expressly names foreign agencies and instrumentalities as defendants — and the Court's prior decisions say that when Congress does this, it has waived immunity, even without a separate waiver statement. Second, requiring plaintiffs to also satisfy FSIA exceptions would effectively kill the cause of action entirely, because the FSIA exceptions require commercial activity or direct effects in the United States — conditions that are nearly impossible to meet given that the same Act imposes a comprehensive embargo blocking almost all U.S.-Cuba commercial dealings. Third, the Act routes jurisdiction through the general federal-question statute (28 U.S.C. §1331) rather than through the FSIA's own jurisdictional provision (§1330), signaling that FSIA rules do not govern these suits. Fourth, the Act gives the President — not the courts — the power to suspend or allow suits based on national security and foreign policy, mirroring the pre-FSIA system where the Executive Branch controlled immunity decisions; it would make no sense to layer FSIA court-based immunity rules on top of that presidential gatekeeping structure.

Dissent reasoning

The dissent argued that the Helms-Burton Act creates a cause of action but says nothing — not a single word — about eliminating sovereign immunity, and that the bar for finding such an elimination is deliberately high. Justice Kagan wrote that a cause of action and an abrogation of immunity are legally distinct things: Congress can do one without doing the other, and doing one does not automatically accomplish the other. The dissent pointed to two significant pieces of evidence that Congress did not intend to eliminate FSIA immunity: Congress actually amended the FSIA in the same Act — but only to adjust execution immunity (protection of property from being seized to pay a judgment), deliberately leaving the FSIA's jurisdictional immunity provision untouched; and an earlier draft of the Act had explicitly amended the FSIA to remove immunity, but Congress dropped that provision after the Justice Department objected. The dissent also argued that the majority's reading of the §1331 jurisdictional provision proves too little, because most Helms-Burton suits are brought against private parties (not Cuban government companies), so it is natural that Congress would reference §1331 — the general federal-question statute — without intending to displace FSIA rules for the subset of suits against sovereign defendants. Finally, the dissent noted that the majority's promised remedy is largely hollow: even if plaintiffs can now get into court, the FSIA's separate execution-immunity rules still shield Cuban government property from being seized to satisfy any judgment, leaving winners with an unenforceable verdict.