I spend my career tracing where judgment-debtor money sits and whether a court order actually gets collected. So, when Justice Sonia Sotomayor refused Monday to freeze a $655.5 million terrorism judgment against the Palestinian Authority and the PLO, my first thought was about October 7, and why the same legal weapon that just worked hasn't been aimed at that atrocity yet.

Sotomayor's one-line denial lets a Southern District of New York jury verdict finally move toward collection, 22 years after Americans were murdered and maimed in Jerusalem-area shootings and bombings. A 2015 jury awarded $218.5 million; federal law tripled it. The PA and PLO spent a decade getting the judgment vacated on jurisdictional grounds, until Congress passed a 2019 law tying U.S. jurisdiction to specific Palestinian conduct, and the Supreme Court upheld it 9-0 last year in Fuld v. PLO. That statute is now a functioning weapon. It's time to point it at Oct. 7.

Here's the case New York families deserve to bring. Hamas murdered 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, including 46 Americans, the deadliest day for U.S. citizens at terrorist hands since 9/11. Everyone knows Hamas ran the attack, not the PA. What almost nobody talks about is what the PLO's own payroll office did next.

The PLO's Commission of Prisoners publicly announced that families of 1,500........

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