United States v. Belmont
United States v. Belmont, 301 U.S. 324 (1937), was a dispute between the federal executive branch and the State of New York over property rights to a deposit from a former Russian corporation with August Belmont & Company, a private New York City banking firm. Belmont established executive predominance over state laws and constitutions in the sphere of foreign policy, and allocated the constitutional power for initiating executive agreements solely to the president of the United States. Background During the Russian Revolution, Petrograd Metal Works, a Russian corporation, deposited a sum of money with August Belmont & Company, a private banker in New York City. On November 6, 1917, the Bolsheviks took control of Russia. With the establishment of the Communist regime, they issued several decrees, which inter alia (among other things) ratified confiscation of private properties without compensation. The Decree of June 15, 1918 was enacted exclusively to outline nationalization of manufacturing companies; a portion of it reads as follows: In an effort to preserve their estates, fugitive business owners had relocated their assets to foreign banks. This impeded Soviet attempts to retrieve those deposits, mainly because they had to negotiate with foreign tribunals which consistently inclined toward the