Zivotofsky_v._Clinton
Zivotofsky v. Clinton
2012 United States Supreme Court case
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]