Is Universal Personal Jurisdiction for Corporations at Stake in Mallory?
This article gets the key issue in the United States Supreme Court’s Mallory case that was recently argued on personal jurisdiction exactly right. If states can enact laws like the Pennsylvania law at issue in the case, that require corporations to consent to personal jurisdiction as a condition of business registration, that effectively erases the divide between general and specific personal jurisdiction. It would make it very possible for lawsuits to go forward not in the jurisdictions where the injury happened or the plaintiff resides (much less the defendant’s actual place of business), but in courts perceived as favorable by the plaintiff(s). This practice is already fairly common today, and it is only the Supreme Court’s recent trend of more restrictive personal jurisdiction jurisprudence that has trimmed it. I have no crystal ball, but it is very hard to see the current Supreme Court going down this path, and I would instead expect a decision that limits the ability of state law to require jurisdiction tied to corporate registration.
It is not hyperbolic to suggest that the court’s ruling could be paradigm shifting.
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Every state in the country has a corporate registration statute. If the court upholds Pennsylvania’s — affirming the application of Pennsylvania Fire’s consent-by-registration theory — we will likely see the end of the general or specific personal jurisdiction divide.
As Justice Kavanaugh observed, every state will be free to either interpret existing registration statutes or enact new ones requiring corporate entities to consent to all-purpose jurisdiction in exchange for the privilege of conducting business there.[37]
That would relegate national corporations to being at home everywhere, meaning they could be haled into any court across the country for any act, no matter where it occurred…
This would lead to rampant venue and forum shopping. If taken to its conclusion, litigants could see the end of International Shoe…
