El al Israel Airlines, LTD. v. Tsui Yuan Tseng (525 U.S. 155)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided January 12, 1999 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 525 U.S. 155 · 119 S. Ct. 662
- Decided
- January 12, 1999
- Term
- October Term 1998
- Vote
- 8–1
- Majority author
- Justice O'Connor
- Issue area
- Economic Activity
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Ginsburg delivered the opinion of the Court. Plaintiff-respondent Tsui Yuan Tseng was subjected to an intrusive security search at John P. Kennedy International Airport in New York before she boarded an El A1 Israel Airlines May 22, 1993 flight to Tel Aviv. Tseng seeks tort damages from El A1 for this occurrence. The episode-in-suit, both parties now submit, does not qualify as an “accident” within the meaning of the treaty popularly known as the Warsaw Convention, which governs air carrier liability for “all international transportation.” Tseng alleges psychic or psychosomatic injuries, but no “bodily injury,” as that term is used in the Convention. Her case presents a question of the Convention’s exclusivity: When the Convention allows no recovery for the episode-in-suit, does it correspondingly preclude the passenger from maintaining an action for damages under another source of law, in this case, New York tort law? The exclusivity question before us has been settled prospectively in a Warsaw Convention protocol (Montreal Protocol No. 4) recently ratified by the Senate. In accord with the protocol, Tseng concedes, a passenger whose injury is not compensable under the Convention (because it entails no “bodily injury” or was not the result of an “accident”) will have no recourse to an alternate remedy. We conclude that the protocol, to which the United States has now…
Excerpt of a 36,087-character opinion. The full text and citation network load in the interactive viewer above.