Cite as: 504 U. S. 607 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
term under the restrictive theory at the time the statute was enacted. See McDermott Int'l, Inc. v. Wilander, 498 U. S. 337, 342 (1991) ("[W]e assume that when a statute uses [a term of art], Congress intended it to have its established meaning"); NLRB v. Amax Coal Co., 453 U. S. 322, 329 (1981); Morissette v. United States, 342 U. S. 246, 263 (1952).
This Court did not have occasion to discuss the scope or validity of the restrictive theory of sovereign immunity until our 1976 decision in Alfred Dunhill of London, Inc. v. Republic of Cuba, 425 U. S. 682. Although the Court there was evenly divided on the question whether the "commercial" exception that applied in the foreign-sovereign-immunity context also limited the availability of an act-of-state defense, compare id., at 695-706 (plurality opinion), with id., at 725-730 (Marshall, J., dissenting), there was little disagreement over the general scope of the exception. The plurality noted that, after the State Department endorsed the restrictive theory of foreign sovereign immunity in 1952, the lower courts consistently held that foreign sovereigns were not immune from the jurisdiction of American courts in cases "arising out of purely commercial transactions," id., at 703, citing, inter alia, Victory Transport, Inc. v. Comisaria General, 336 F. 2d 354 (CA2 1964), cert. denied, 381 U. S. 934 (1965), and Petrol Shipping Corp. v. Kingdom of Greece, 360 F. 2d 103 (CA2), cert. denied, 385 U. S. 931 (1966). The plurality further recognized that the distinction between state sovereign acts, on the one hand, and state commercial and private acts, on the other, was not entirely novel to American law. See 425 U. S., at 695-696, citing, inter alia, Parden v. Terminal Railway of Alabama Docks Dept., 377 U. S. 184, 189-190 (1964) (Eleventh Amendment immunity); Bank of United States v. Planters' Bank of Georgia, 9 Wheat. 904, 907-908 (1824) (same); New York v. United States, 326 U. S. 572, 579 (1946) (opinion of Frankfurter, J.) (tax immunity of States); and South Carolina v. United States, 199 U. S. 437, 461-463 (1905) (same). The plurality
613
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