The presumption against extraterritoriality (“PAE”), like all canons of construction, is a shorthand rule of interpretation used by judges to determine how a statute should be applied. Under the PAE, where there exists ambiguity as to the geographical scope of a statute, the court is required to limit the statute’s application to acts which occur within the territorial limits of the United States. But the PAE, as originally construed in EEOC v. Arabian American Oil Co. (1991) (“Aramco”), and as elaborated upon in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. (2010) and, more recently, in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (2013), is of a relatively modern vintage for a judicial canon, as it did not exist in its current form until the second half of the 20th century. Prior to the 1950s, the PAE, as it is understood today, did not exist. The modern PAE is instead a conflation of two older canons of construction, and although both those canons are often described as ‘presumptions against extraterritoriality,’ neither canon functioned in the manner that the PAE does today.

These two prior canons, although related both to each other and the modern PAE, were used by the courts two answer two separate questions of statutory construction, and did not typically overlap in their application. The first of these canons, which for purposes of this post has been dubbed the presumption against absurdities (“PAA”), was a presumption that a statute does not provide for extraterritorial application when doing so or when such an interpretation would necessarily imply that the court possesses an unflattering opinion of Congress’ competence. The second canon, which will be referred to here as the presumption against universality (“PAU”), provided that when a statute uses words such as “any,” or “all,” or “every,” those words would not be presumed to have been intended literally when the statute’s context shows that Congress used those words with a more limited definition in mind.

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