The law of foreign sovereign immunity changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century. The United States abandoned the doctrine of absolute immunity and opened its courts to lawsuits by private claimants against foreign governments and officials. It also pursued a range of other policies designed to shift such disputes into litigation or arbitration (and thus relieve political actors of pressure to intervene on behalf of disappointed creditors). This article explores how international financial contracts responded to these legal and policy initiatives and presents findings with implications for our understanding of sovereign immunity law, for debates about the role of litigation in the current financial crisis, and for contract theory. [...]