Personal Jurisdiction – Messy Jurisprudence that May Be in Even Greater Flux

            Rex Lee, the late Reagan-era solicitor general and president of  Brigham Young University, once wrote that the Supreme Court’s “net contribution” to a “cohesive body of law” applying the First Amendment’s  Religion Clauses “has been zero” and added that “some would say that it has been less than zero.”[1] Personal jurisdiction, a subject of intense interest in the Court over the past dozen years, has suffered a similar fate with the Court making a hash of it.

            If there is one case lawyers remember from their civil procedure class, it is Int'l Shoe Co. v. Washington,[2] which established that due process only required that a defendant have “certain minimum contacts” of a continuous and systematic nature with a jurisdiction sufficient “that the maintenance of the suit does not offend ‘traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice.’”[3] Int’l Shoe overturned Pennoyer v. Neff,[4] which adhered to a rigid territorial limitation that was somehow derived from the Due Process Clause. With the demise of Pennoyer, states began to enact long-arm statutes that enabled them to exercise authority over out-of-state defendants who had caused injury and damage within the state. About a decade after Int’l Shoe, the Court speculated that the law would continue to expand “the permissible scope of state jurisdiction over foreign corporations and other nonresidents,” because of the “increasing nationalization of commerce” and the ease of “modern transportation and communication” to make it “less burdensome for a party sued to defend himself in a State where he engages in economic activity.”[5]

            Yet, more recently, the Court has adopted a more restrictive approach to personal jurisdiction than Int’l Shoe suggests, even as it continues to identify that opinion as the “canonical decision” on personal jurisdiction.[6] Its recent cases have reduced Int’l Shoe’s flexibility into a set of mechanical, bright-line rules that it often claims divides personal jurisdiction into only two forms: “specific” and “general.”[7]

Specific jurisdiction exists when the activity or occurrence that is the subject of the lawsuit takes place in forum State.[8] A defective product is sold or shipped there. Thus, in Bristol-Myers, the Court permitted California consumers of the allegedly defective drug to sue the out-of-state manufacturer for their injuries, but held that non-California plaintiffs alleging the same injuries could not sue in that state, but had to initiate separate lawsuits in their home states, even if the allegations were identical. Those who also sued the distribution company in California had to split their lawsuits, because the distributor was California-based and subject to general jurisdiction in California. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out in dissent, the decision was a substantial “contraction of specific jurisdiction by holding that a corporation that engages in a nationwide course of conduct cannot be held accountable in a state court by a group of injured people unless all of those people were injured in the forum State.”[9] Moreover, she points out that the consequences of the decision is to prevent plaintiffs from banding together from different states to bring a single action based on a defendant's nationwide course of conduct, unless they sue in the defendant’s home state, where the action would likely have to be subdivided into claims for each plaintiff’s home state.[10] Yet, where the defendants are from different states so that no one state will be able to entertain the mass action, there will have to be a multiplicity of lawsuits,[11] including potentially separate lawsuits against each defendant, creating a potential “empty-chair” defense.  

General jurisdiction provides all-purpose authority over a defendant when it is “essentially at home” in the forum because it is either incorporated or has its headquarters there.[12] Under the general jurisdiction rubric, illogically, a corporation can have a broad corporate campus and substantial operations in a state, but not be subject to general jurisdiction there. Yet, incorporation in, say, Delaware, where its only presence is a post office box, is sufficient to subject the corporation to suit in that state because it is deemed essentially at home even if not actually present there.

Yet, specific and general are not the only types of personal jurisdiction that exist, even though the Court has said as much. For example, the Court has also recognized “tag” jurisdiction, which subjects an individual from outside the state to jurisdiction when served in the state.[13] Although being subject to personal jurisdiction when caught passing through a state could pose a hardship to an individual, no similar concept permits jurisdiction over a corporation that maintains a continuous and substantial presence in the state. A second form of personal jurisdiction is consent jurisdiction, where the defendant either agrees to jurisdiction or does not fight it.[14] The Supreme Court has previously approved state statutes that require registration and consent to personal jurisdiction as the price of doing business in a state.[15] Yet, on November 8 of last year, the Court heard argument on whether the Pennsylvania consent statute it upheld more than a century ago violated due process in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Ry. Co., No. 21-1168, where a decision is expected by June.

And there are congressional grants of personal jurisdiction as well.[16] Yet, a 12-5 en banc decision by the Fifth Circuit last year, for which certiorari was denied this past week, required the use of Rule 4(k)(2), promulgated as a federal long-arm statute at the suggestion of the U.S. Supreme Court to reach foreign defendants, still had to satisfy the general jurisdiction test, so that it could never be used for foreign or domestic defendants. [17] Foreign defendants cannot be “at home” in the U.S. And, if general jurisdiction applies, Rule 4(k)(2) is unnecessary The decision effectively renders the rule unconstitutional as a matter of due process.

Is there a way out of the current messy jurisprudence that has developed recently? Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Thomas, has suggested that the current personal-injury regime is looking “quaint” and “a little battered” “when corporations with global reach often have massive operations spread across multiple States,” rather than one or two homes.[18] He added, “[m]aybe, too, International Shoe just doesn’t work quite as well as it once did.”[19] So, while the past dozen years have seen a revolution in personal jurisdiction as the Court embarked on a more restrict approach, leavened a bit by its 2021 decision in Ford, another potentially abrupt change may be in the making. Indeed, originalist scholars contend that due process puts no limitation on federal personal jurisdiction.[20] If the Court, which has taken an originalist approach to a number of constitutional issues, goes down that path, they could untangle the ball they created for personal jurisdiction. Could they also replace it with nothing?

 

[1] Rex. E. Lee, The Religion Clauses: Problems and Prospects, 1986 B.Y.U. L. Rev. 337, 338 (1986).

[2] 326 U.S. 310 (1945).

[3] Id. at 316.

[4] 95 U.S. 714 (1877).

[5] McGee v. Int’l Life Ins. Co., 355 U.S. 220, 222-23 (1957).

[6] Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Jud. Dist. Ct., 141 S. Ct. 1017, 1024 (2021).

[7] Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Ct. of California, San Francisco Cnty., 582 U.S. 255, 262 (2017).

[8] Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S.A. v. Brown, 564 U.S. 915, 919 (2011).

[9] Bristol-Myers., 582 U.S. at 269 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).

[10] Id. at 277 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).

[11] Id. at 278 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).

[12] Goodyear, 564 U.S. at 919.

[13] Burnham v. Sup. Ct., 495 U.S. 604, 619 (1990) (plurality op.).

[14] Ins. Corp. of Ireland v. Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinee, 456 U.S. 694, 703 (1982).

[15] See, e.g., Pennsylvania Fire Ins. Co. v. Gold Issue Mining & Milling Co., 243 U.S. 93 (1917); Ex parte Schollenberger, 96 U.S. 369, 376-77 (1877).

[16] See, e.g., D'Arcy v. Ketchum, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 165, 176 (1850).

[17] Douglass v. Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha, 46 F.4th 226 (5th Cir. 2022), cert. denied, No. 22-562, 2023 WL 2563319 (U.S. Mar. 20, 2023). The author was counsel for Petitioners in the Fifth Circuit and in the Supreme Court.

[18] Ford, 141 S. Ct. 1017, 1034 (2021) (Gorsuch, J., concurring).

[19] Id. at 1038 (Gorsuch, J., concurring).

[20] See, e.g., Max Crema & Lawrence B. Solum, The Original Meaning of “Due Process of Law” in the Fifth Amendment, 108 Va. L. Rev. 447, 467 (2022); Lawrence B. Solum & Max Crema, Originalism and Personal Jurisdiction: Several Questions and a Few Answers, 73 Ala. L. Rev. 483, 524 (2022); and Stephen E. Sachs, The Unlimited Jurisdiction of the Federal Courts, 106 Va. L. Rev. 1703 (2020).