Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they feared that hearing cases against corporations under the 1789 law would cause friction in foreign relations.

Mr. Fisher said that closing the courthouse door to such suits could also cause tension.

“Imagine Israel’s view if our entire finance system could be used and accessed to commit terrorist attacks, make them easier, make them more deadly, make the funding more effective,” he said. “If suits like this were taken away, Israel and countries like it might well have a complaint to the United States.”

In 2013, in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, the Supreme Court imposed strict limits on suits under the 1789 law, though it did not rule on whether corporations may ever be defendants in them. Instead, the majority said there was a general presumption against the extraterritorial application of American law.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, said that even minimal contact with the United States would not be sufficient to overcome the presumption.

“Even where the claims touch and concern the territory of the United States,” he wrote, “they must do so with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application.”

That decision led to the dismissal of many lawsuits, Mr. Fisher told the justices. In 2013, he said, there were 40 lawsuits pending against corporations under the 1789 law. “In the two years after Kiobel,” he said, “over 70 percent of those cases were dismissed on extraterritoriality grounds, and another 10 percent were dismissed for other reasons.”

On Wednesday, the more liberal justices said courts had many ways to police abusive lawsuits without giving corporations a free pass. Justice Elena Kagan, for instance, told a lawyer for the bank that “you have plenty of things to gripe about in this lawsuit.” But she added that corporate liability was not one of them.