“The murder of a U.S. national is an offense to the United States as much as it is to the country where the murder occurred and to which the victim is a stranger,” he wrote. “That is why the killing of an American abroad is a federal offense that can be prosecuted in our courts, and why customary international law allows this exercise of jurisdiction.”

Much of Justice Alito’s majority opinion was a detailed account of old English decisions, treatises and founding-era materials. He said Mr. Gamble had failed to make a compelling case based on those documents for overruling the court’s longstanding interpretation of the Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy clause.

“The English cases are a muddle,” Justice Alito wrote. “Treatises offer spotty support. And early state and federal cases are by turns equivocal and downright harmful to Gamble’s position. All told, this evidence does not establish that those who ratified the Fifth Amendment took it to bar successive prosecutions under different sovereigns’ laws — much less do so with enough force to break a chain of precedent linking dozens of cases over 170 years.”

There had been signs that at least some justices were uneasy with that line of cases. In 2016, Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, called for a new look at whether the exception makes sense. “The matter warrants attention in a future case in which a defendant faces successive prosecutions by parts of the whole U.S.A.,” she wrote.

As that alliance suggested, the issue did not divide the justices across the usual ideological lines. But Justice Thomas reversed course in a 17-page concurring opinion on Monday, writing that “the historical record does not bear out my initial skepticism of the dual-sovereignty doctrine.”



Justice Thomas’s opinion was also notable for its extended critique of the court’s general approach to how much respect to give precedents. He said the court should not hesitate to overrule “demonstrably erroneous precedents.”

In dissent, Justice Ginsburg said the court should have overturned the double jeopardy decisions at issue in Mr. Gamble’s case, saying they had “been subject to relentless criticism by members of the bench, bar and academy.”