Zivotofsky v. Clinton

Zivotofsky v. Clinton
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued November 7, 2011 Decided March 26, 2012
Full case name	Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky, By His Parents and Guardians, Ari Z. and Naomi Siegman Zivotofsky v. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State
Docket no.	10-699
Citations	566 U.S. 189 (more) 132 S. Ct. 1421; 182 L. Ed. 2d 423; 2012 U.S. LEXIS 2536; 80 U.S.L.W. 4260
Case history
Prior	Motion to dismiss granted, 2004 WL 5835212 (D.D.C. 2004); remanded, 444 F.3d 614 (D.C. Cir. 2006); dismissed again, 511 F.Supp.2d 97 (D.D.C. 2007); affirmed, 571 F.3d 1227 (D.C. Cir. 2009); rehearing en banc denied, 610 F.3d 84 (D.C. Cir. 2010); certiorari granted, 563 U. S. ___ (2011)
Subsequent	See Zivotofsky v. Kerry for details.
Holding
Reversed. The political-question doctrine does not bar judicial review of Zivotofsky’s claim that his passport should read "Israel."
Court membership
Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy Clarence Thomas · Ruth Bader Ginsburg Stephen Breyer · Samuel Alito Sonia Sotomayor · Elena Kagan
Case opinions
Majority	Roberts, joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Kagan
Concurrence	Alito (in judgment)
Concurrence	Sotomayor (in part), joined by Breyer (Part I)
Dissent	Breyer
Laws applied
Article I, Section 8

Zivotofsky v. Clinton, 566 U.S. 189 (2012), is a Supreme Court of the United States decision in which the Court held that a dispute about passport regulation was not a political question and thus resolvable by the US court system. Specifically, Zivotofsky's parents sought to have his passport read "Jerusalem, Israel", rather than "Jerusalem", as his place of birth. The State Department had rejected that request under a longstanding policy that took no stance on the legal status of Jerusalem. Zivotofsky's parents then sued, citing a Congressional law that ordered the Secretary of State to list people born in Jerusalem as born in Israel.

In Zivotofsky v. Clinton, the Supreme Court rejected the State Department's claim that issues of foreign policy were inherently political and thus not justiciable by the Courts. The State Department had argued that the case could not be resolved except by adjudicating the status of Jerusalem. The Court found that resolving the Zivotofskys' dispute did not require such analysis, because the constitutionality of the challenged law could be distinguished from the accuracy of the resulting passport listings.

On remand, the Court of Appeals held in July 2013 that the law was an unconstitutional infringement of the president's recognition powers,^[1] which would later be appealed back to the Supreme Court in Zivotofsky v. Kerry.^[2]