Concept
Citizenship of Individuals
Diversity jurisdiction
Citizenship of Individuals
Section 1332(a)(1) gives the district courts jurisdiction over actions “between citizens of different States,” and the complete-diversity comparison cannot run until each party has been assigned a State.1 The assignment depends on the kind of party. This unit takes up natural persons first, meaning human beings as distinct from corporations and other entities, and then the legal representatives who sue for decedents, minors, and incompetents.
The statute defines citizenship for corporations and for those representatives, and it says nothing about ordinary adults.2 Courts fill the gap with a federal test, and the test must do one demanding job. The complete-diversity rule asks whether any State appears on both sides of the caption, so every person must land in exactly one State at a time. Domicile does that work; residence cannot. Representatives come second because § 1332(c)(2) changes the result for them: the person named in the caption may not be the person whose interests are at stake, and the statute reaches past the title-holder to the person represented.
Domicile, Not Residence
Mas v. Perry sets the standard: a natural person is a citizen of a State within the meaning of § 1332 only if the person is both a citizen of the United States and a domiciliary of that State.3 Federal law, not the law of any State, controls the determination, and for diversity purposes citizenship means domicile: mere residence is not sufficient.4
Domicile is a person’s “true, fixed, and permanent home and principal establishment, and to which he has the intention of returning whenever he is absent therefrom.”5 A person may have many residences but only one domicile.6 That singleness is why the test works. The Strawbridge comparison assigns each party to one State, and a rule that counted every State where a person lives, works, or keeps a vacation house would multiply the overlaps and make jurisdiction turn on where a litigant happened to keep a bed.
A person acquires a new domicile by combining two elements: taking up residence in the new place and intending to remain there.7 Neither physical presence nor intent alone is sufficient.8 Each element screens out a different error. Presence shows that the person has put down a base, so someone who merely announces a future move has not yet joined the new community. Intent shows that a hospital stay, a business trip, or a season of travel does not turn a visitor into a citizen. The intent required is to remain indefinitely, not forever: it is enough that the person means to make the new State home and has no present intention of going elsewhere.9
Presence and intent need not coincide on the day of arrival. Meyer reaches Oklahoma with no plan to stay, then decides while living there to make it home; Oklahoma becomes his domicile when he forms that intent, because a new domicile exists whenever the two elements coincide at some time during the stay.10 Demanding that both be present at arrival is the frequent mistake in applying the rule.11
Because both elements must coincide before a new domicile exists, the old domicile keeps working in the meantime: once established, a domicile continues unless and until a new one is acquired.12 A person moving between homes therefore never lacks a State for diversity purposes. Most courts identify the last State in which the person resided with the intent to remain indefinitely,13 and when the current address fails that test they look further back, sometimes to the parents’ home of the person’s girlhood.14
That look-back method governs people who live somewhere without having settled there. Students, members of the armed services, and prisoners can establish a domicile where they are, even if they live there only temporarily or involuntarily; the key is whether they intend to maintain their principal establishment there for the time being.15 A student who rents near campus but plans to go home after graduating has presence without intent to remain, and the last State where the two coincided keeps the domicile.16 Mas v. Perry reached the same kind of result. The Fifth Circuit held Mrs. Mas a citizen of Mississippi although the couple had lived in Louisiana, and it treated their later moves as supporting their lack of intent to remain permanently in Louisiana.17
Carly shows the method on fresh facts. A New Yorker by birth, she lived in New York until college, studied in California, and then moved to Washington, D.C., for law school, always planning to return to New York; she even voted in California elections while there.18 In California and again in D.C. she was present without intent to remain, so New York is the last State where presence and intent coincided, and a plaintiff domiciled anywhere else is diverse from her. Her California vote is evidence about intent, but it does not outweigh a consistent plan to go home.
Volition separates the person who chooses a place from the person who is sent there. A prisoner does not pick his prison and a service member does not pick her post, so an official transfer does not by itself show a decision to make a new State home.19 An employee who accepts a transfer from a global business stands differently: she could have given up the job and stayed home, and an actual move to the new State typically changes her domicile.20
Intent lives in a person’s head, so the factfinder infers it from objective circumstances: the person’s declarations, exercise of political rights, payment of personal taxes, house of residence, and place of business.21 The judge ordinarily decides the question. On appeal, the court of appeals reviews the district court’s findings of fact for clear error and reviews questions of law de novo.22
The reason for a move does not matter if the move is genuine. A person who relocates in good faith, with presence and intent to remain, becomes a citizen of the new State even if the sole or central aim was to reach federal court.23 A party who plans to move back to the former home once the lawsuit ends has made no bona fide change.24
The usual error treats a costly second home as a second citizenship. A person may have a number of residences but only one domicile.25 Neither the price of the house nor the time spent in it changes that, because the inquiry asks where the person has made a home.
The fifth step decides most cases, because the contact lists run long on both sides and the answer depends on which contacts show where the person means to live. Ma and Pa illustrate the argument. They own a Florida condominium and now live in a New York apartment. They left their furniture in the condo and bought all new things for the apartment; Pa got his old job back, and Ma volunteers at a local hospital.29 Pa opened a New York checking account but kept his Florida savings account and safe deposit box. He pays utility bills in both States, both hold Florida driver’s licenses, and he insured the car in New York because Florida rates were high. Pa wants to keep the condo because “we’ll still have the condo when I can finally retire,” and Ma does not care what he does with it as long as she does not have to be in it.30
Ma and Pa sue a New York driver in federal court for $80,000. The amount in controversy is met, so citizenship decides whether the court can hear the case: to be diverse from a New York domiciliary, they must show physical presence in Florida and an intent to remain there indefinitely.31
A strong answer lists the contacts on each side before arguing from them.32 Florida: the condo and its furniture, the savings account and safe deposit box, the utility bills, and the licenses. New York: the apartment and its new furnishings, the checking account, the utility bills, the car insurance, Pa’s job, and Ma’s volunteer work. Contacts are only evidence of intent, so intent decides the case. Florida’s argument runs through step three: if Ma and Pa had settled in the condo, that domicile continues until they acquire a new one, and a New York domicile requires an intent to remain there indefinitely. Pa’s plan to keep the condo for retirement suggests they have not formed that intent. New York’s argument answers that the intent need only be indefinite, that a retirement plan with no date is not a present intention of going elsewhere, that Ma will not live in the condo, and that Pa is back at his old job.33
On balance New York is the better-supported domicile, which would defeat diversity against a New York driver, though the opposite conclusion can also be defended on these facts.34 A good answer names intent as the deciding question, assigns each contact to the side it supports, and commits to a result while acknowledging the other.
Legal Representatives and Minors
Some parties appear in a federal caption only as stand-ins. A decedent, an infant (a minor child), and an incompetent (an adult without legal capacity to manage personal affairs) cannot conduct a lawsuit, so an executor, administrator, guardian, or similar legal representative sues or defends for them. Section 1332(c)(2) tells the court whose citizenship counts: the legal representative of a decedent’s estate is deemed a citizen only of the same State as the decedent, and the legal representative of an infant or incompetent is deemed a citizen only of the same State as the infant or incompetent.36 The word only forecloses any claim that the representative carries two citizenships. The representative’s own State drops out of the comparison, and the court runs the complete-diversity check with the State of the person represented.
The rule is easier to appreciate once you see what it replaced. Courts once treated the executor or administrator as controlling the litigation, so the representative’s own citizenship governed, not the State of appointment, the decedent’s citizenship, or the citizenship of creditors, next of kin, or legatees. The rule applied whether it created jurisdiction that would otherwise be absent or defeated jurisdiction that would otherwise exist.37 A general guardian empowered by state law to sue in its own name likewise supplied its own citizenship, but a guardian ad litem, responsible only for a particular litigation, was a nominal party, and the court looked to the ward’s citizenship.38 The choice of representative could therefore steer the forum, and an out-of-state relative could be named to reach federal court.
Section 1359 supplied only a partial check. It bars jurisdiction over an action to which a party has been improperly or collusively joined, as when one party assigns a promissory note or other valuable instrument to another to manufacture diversity.39 Kramer v. Caribbean Mills, Inc. applied that bar to an assignment made to create diversity. The courts of appeals varied widely, however, about when to invoke § 1359 against a representative and whose decision should control if the representative’s did not.40 A 1988 amendment, taken nearly verbatim from an American Law Institute proposal made 19 years earlier, ended the uncertainty by writing the current text of § 1332(c)(2). It eliminates all questions of motivation and supplies a test that is easy to administer.41 No incentive remains to appoint an out-of-state representative in order to fit within the diversity statute.42
The old rule cut both ways. In Mecom v. Fitzsimmons Drilling Company, the Supreme Court held that the appointment of an administrator who shared the out-of-state defendant’s citizenship defeated removal, because the administrator’s own citizenship controlled. Later courts began to reexamine Mecom and to hold that such an appointment need not defeat removal. The 1988 amendment settles the question: the court looks to the decedent’s State in every such case, and the rule prevents the appointment of a representative to defeat diversity as effectively as it prevents the appointment of one to create it.43
A guardian follows the same path. A Missouri citizen who sues as guardian of an incapacitated brother domiciled in Iowa takes on his brother’s Iowa citizenship for the case.44 The statute reassigns the representative; the represented person’s own State still comes from the ordinary test of citizenship and domicile.45 For an incompetent adult that test is harder to apply, because courts have not agreed on how such a person’s domicile is fixed; one court, deciding entitlement to state benefits, placed an incompetent adult in the State where he had lived for many years even though his parents were domiciled elsewhere.46
An exam stem that gives the representative a State different from the decedent’s tests whether you reach through the representative to the person represented. Counting the representative’s own State loses the point in either direction: it manufactures diversity in one problem and destroys it in another.
Minors raise a further question, because § 1332(c)(2) sends the court to the infant’s State without saying how a child acquires one. A minor’s citizenship follows the citizenship of the custodial parent or parents,47 and a child’s domicile has been thought to be the parents’ at least until the child is emancipated.48 After a separation or divorce, the custodial parent’s domicile is the anchor. The rule follows from the domicile test: domicile requires presence plus an intent to remain, and a child under a parent’s control cannot form that intent independently, so the law borrows the domicile of the adult who controls the home.
Emancipation ends the borrowed domicile, because a child who is no longer under a parent’s control is no longer tied to the parents’ domicile. Like every citizenship question, the representative and minor analysis is run as of the day the complaint is filed, and later changes do not defeat jurisdiction that has already attached.49 The statute ties jurisdiction to the person whose interests are at stake and keeps the choice of representative from steering the forum, a concern that returns in the section on collusion and manufactured diversity.