LAW

481

The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA) sets forth legal criteria for determining when a "foreign state," 28 U. S. C. § 1603(a), can assert a defense of sovereign immunity. The FSIA also specifies that a "foreign state" defendant may ask a federal court to make the relevant sovereign immunity determination. § 1441(d). And the FSIA allows certain foreign-state commercial entities not entitled to sovereign immunity to have the merits of a case heard in federal court. §§ 1330(a), 1441(d), 1605(a)(2). These last-mentioned entities, entitled to invoke federalcourt jurisdiction, include corporations that fall within the FSIA's definition of an "agency or instrumentality of a foreign state," §§ 1603(a), (b).

The corporate defendants here, subsidiaries of a foreign parent corporation, fall within that definition if "a majority of [their] shares or other ownership interest is owned by" a foreign nation. § 1603(b)(2) (emphasis added). The relevant foreign nation does not directly own a majority of the corporate subsidiaries' shares. But (simplifying the facts) it does own a corporate parent, which, in turn, owns the corporate subsidiaries' shares. See ante, at 473-474.

Does this type of majority-ownership interest count as an example of what the statute calls an "other ownership interest"? The Court says no, holding that the text of the FSIA requires that "only direct ownership of a majority of shares by the foreign state satisfies the statutory requirement." Ante, at 474 (emphasis added). I disagree.

The statute's language, standing alone, cannot answer the question. That is because the words "own" and "ownership"-neither of which is defined in the FSIA-are not technical terms or terms of art but common terms, the precise legal meaning of which depends upon the statutory context in which they appear. See J. Cribbet & C. Johnson, Principles of the Law of Property 16 (3d ed. 1989) ("AngloAmerican law has not made much use of the term ownership in a technical sense"); Black's Law Dictionary 1049, 1105 (6th