New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a California woman injured in a train accident in Austria cannot sue in an American court. It was the Supreme Court’s first decision of the term in an argued case, and it was unanimous.

The woman, Carol P. Sachs of Berkeley, lost her legs after trying to board a moving train in Innsbruck. She said she should be allowed to sue the railroad in federal court in California because she had bought her Eurail pass in the United States on the Internet, from a travel agent in Massachusetts.

But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the court, said the crucial events all took place in Austria, meaning the lawsuit must be filed there. “However Sachs frames her suit,” the chief justice wrote, “the incident in Innsbruck remains at its foundation.”

He quoted a 1915 letter from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Felix Frankfurter, a law professor at Harvard who would later join the court. The crucial moment in a personal injury case, Justice Holmes wrote, is the “point of contact” — “the place where the boy got his fingers pinched.”

Chief Justice Roberts said the observation was apt. “At least in this case,” he wrote, “that insight holds true.”

The precise legal question in the case was whether the railroad, which is owned by the Austrian government, was entitled to sovereign immunity. Foreign states are generally protected by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, but that law makes an exception for claims “based upon a commercial activity carried on in the United States.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco,allowed Ms. Sachs’s suit to proceed, reasoning that “it is not necessary that the entire claim be based upon the commercial activity” of the railroad in the United States. The sale of the Eurail pass in the United States, the appeals court said, was enough to satisfy the exception.

The Supreme Court disagreed. What mattered, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, was the core, or gravamen, of the lawsuit.

“Under this analysis,” he wrote, “the conduct constituting the gravamen of Sachs’s suit plainly occurred abroad. All of her claims turn on the same tragic episode in Austria, allegedly caused by wrongful conduct and dangerous conditions in Austria, which led to injuries suffered in Austria.”

He rejected Ms. Sachs’s argument that the Massachusetts company should have warned her about the risks she would face.

“There is nothing wrongful about the sale of the Eurail pass standing alone,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “Without the existence of the unsafe boarding conditions in Innsbruck, there would have been nothing to warn Sachs about when she bought the Eurail pass.”

The case, OBB Personenverkehr A.G. v. Sachs, No. 13-1067, was the first one argued this term, which started on Oct. 5. The argument did not go wellfor Ms. Sachs.

“There is one contact with the United States,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an expert on jurisdiction, said at the argument. “A pass is bought from a travel agent in Massachusetts, a pass covering 30-odd railroads. That’s all that happened in the United States.”

“All of the relevant conduct, the tortious conduct, occurred abroad,” she added.