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55 Am. J. Legal Hist. 465 (2015)
The Tate Letter: Some Words regarding Its Authorship

handle is hein.journals/amhist55 and id is 479 raw text is: The Tate Letter: Some Words Regarding Its Authorship by ROBERT M. JARVIS* On May 19, 1952, Jack B. Tate signed what has become known as the Tate Letter.' The Letter announced that the U.S. Department of State was abandoning its longstanding recognition of the doc- trine of absolute sovereign immunity, thereby freeing plaintiffs to sue foreign governments for their commercial acts.2 In 1976, Con- gress placed its imprimatur on the Letter by enacting the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.3 At the time of the Letter's issuance, Tate was the State Depart- ment's Acting Legal Adviser. A 1926 graduate of Yale Law School, Tate had been a federal employee for decades, dividing his time among various agencies. In 1953, he left the government and en- tered academia. After a brief stay at New York University, he re- turned to Yale and served as associate dean and professor of international law until his death in 1968.4 * Professor of Law, Nova Southeastern University(jarvisb@nsu.law.nova.edu). Chair of the Advisory Board of the American Journal of Legal History. Thanks are due to Jim Armistead (Harry S.Truman Library and Museum); Amy Garrett (Office of the Historian-U.S. Department of State); Mark Temelko (Office of Public Affairs- Yale Law School); and genealogists Rachal Mills Lennon and Lisa Stansbury Morgan. The photographs of Jack B. Tate and Conrad E. Snow that accompany this essay are reproduced with the permission of, respectively, Yale Law School and the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum (with further credit to the U.S. Army Signal Corps). I See Jack B. Tate, Changed Policy Concerning the Granting of Sovereign Immunity to Foreign Governments, 26 DEP'T STATE BULL. 984 (1952). 2 See William W. Bishop, Jr., New United States Policy Limiting Sovereign Immun- ity, 47 AM. i. INT'L L. 93 (1953). 3 See 28 U.S.C. §§ 1330, 1602-1611. The path from the Letter to the FSIA is recounted in Ruth Donner, The Tate Letter Revisited, 9 WILLAMETTE J. INT'L L & DISP. RESOL. 27 (2001). 4 See Dean Jack B. Tate, 1902-1968, 14 Yale L. Rep. 1 (Summer 1968); Jack B. Tate, 65, A Yale Law Dean: Ex-State Department Aide and Professor is Dead, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 22, 1968, at 47; OGC Key Personnel Archive-1937-1939 and 1940-1947: Former Gen- eral Counsel Jack B. Tate, at http://www.hhs.gov/ogc/personnel/tatebio.html. OThe Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

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