Daimler and Bristol-Meyers: What’s Next for Personal Judicial Jurisdiction in the United States?
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Description
After the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Daimler AG v. Bauman, which meant the end of the “doing business” jurisdiction in the United States, the nagging question left to address is: “What’s next for personal judicial jurisdiction in the United States?” In order to make sense of the future, some sense of the past is necessary, so a short summary is in order as to why Daimler and subsequently Bristol-Myers have ushered in a new era. Generally, the outer limit on the assertion of jurisdiction in the United States is a constitutional one imposed by the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. In Daimler, the Supreme Court reaffirmed what it had only hinted at in dicta a few years earlier in Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations S.A. v. Brown: that for general or “all-purpose jurisdiction”—meaning a claim unrelated to the defendant’s forum activities—a corporation’s affiliations with a forum must be so continuous and systematic as to render it essentially “at home”; and that the paradigm situation of “at home” should be understood as the corporation’s place of incorporation or its principal place of business. That rule would seem uncontroversial to lawyers in Europe. However, from the 19th century on, in the United States, a corporation was subject to jurisdiction wherever it was incorporated or said to be “present” in the forum; and “presence” was satisfied when the corporation had a certain level of systematic and continuous activities in that forum and could be said to be “doing business” there. The Supreme Court appeared to adopt that standard in dicta in 1945 in the International Shoe case, but International Shoe itself involved only the issue of specific—or as it is known in Europe, special—jurisdiction. In two other cases that reached the Court over the next 65 years, the Court appeared to confirm the “systematic and continuous” activities standard. Then in the 2011 Goodyear decision, the Supreme Court reversed a lower North Carolina state court which had asserted jurisdiction over foreign tire manufacturers for an accident that took place in France based on the defendants’ sales of similar tires in North Carolina. The decision was unsurprising since it was clear under Supreme Court (as well as lower court) precedents that mere sales by a corporate defendant into a state would not constitutionally suffice for general jurisdiction even under the old “doing business” standard. However, the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Ginsburg, went much further in dicta to say that a corporation’s affiliations with a forum must be “so continuous and systematic” to render it “at home”, adding that the paradigm for “home” was the place of incorporation and principal place of business of the corporation.” Post-Goodyear, scholars debated whether the “at home” language was merely superfluous and did not alter the current doctrine, or whether the Court had dramatically changed the prior “doing business” standard for general jurisdiction. The answer finally came in the Daimler case, where Justice Ginsburg in the opinion for the Court stated “we really meant what we said” in Goodyear. It was a surprising comment because the standard for general jurisdiction was not even the issue on which the Supreme Court had taken the case.
Source Publication
US Litigation Today: Still a Threat for European Businesses or Just a Paper Tiger?—Conference Proceedings from the 29th Journée de droit international privé of 23 June 2017
Source Editors/Authors
Andrea Bonomi, Krista Nadakavukaren Schefer
Publication Date
2018
Recommended Citation
Silberman, Linda J., "Daimler and Bristol-Meyers: What’s Next for Personal Judicial Jurisdiction in the United States?" (2018). Faculty Chapters. 1416.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1416
