Abstract
Personal jurisdiction doctrine is a mess. In an attempt to clarify personal jurisdiction doctrine, the Supreme Court has routinely obscured its underlying rationale. That rationale predates the Court’s landmark decision in Pennoyer v. Neff and continues to loom in the background of the most recent post-International Shoe cases. Instead of laying bare that rationale, the doctrine has devolved into a string of proxies built upon proxies—all laboring mightily to avoid stating the obvious: State authority lies at the heart of all personal jurisdiction inquiries. From “physical presence” to “minimum contacts” to “targeting” to “effects” to “relatedness,” all fictions strive to stand in for the forum state’s authority. And they work . . . sometimes. They are good estimates of state authority . . . for a little while. The problem is that any proxy works only as long as technology and society remain stagnant. Innovation inevitably pushes it toward absurdity. This Article presents a novel approach to personal jurisdiction by arguing for a recentering of discussions around state authority, specifically within the context of International Shoe’s fairness factors, as opposed to the traditional focus on the defendant’s due process rights. Its discussion, grounded in a thorough analysis of recent Supreme Court rulings, points to glaring inconsistencies and gaps within the jurisprudential landscape. It advocates for an impending shift in legal paradigms, crucial for adapting to the evolving technological milieu and anticipating the inevitable obsolescence of International Shoe. This Article is the first of two in a series. It ventures beyond broad jurisdictional resolutions in existing scholarship and instead uses the tension between two post-International Shoe decisions—Keeton v. Hustler Magazine and the more recent Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of California—to highlight a larger problem with the fictions setting the constitutional limits on personal jurisdiction. The Article then uses this observation to argue, in light of the oft-understated state-authority rationale at the root of personal jurisdiction, Keeton must fall. A subsequent article will highlight the failings of proxies in other lines of personal jurisdiction cases—such as stream-of-commerce jurisdiction—to argue that the Supreme Court should revisit International Shoe and adopt a constitutional standard centered around state authority, not contacts.
Recommended Citation
Peter B. Rutledge, E. Reed Lemasters, and Caleb Z. Morris,
Jurisdiction Fiction: Is International Shoe Due for a Pennoyer Moment? Part I,
91 Mo. L. Rev.
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Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol91/iss2/7