General Versus Specific Jurisdiction

General Jurisdiction and the Home Forum

General Versus Specific Jurisdiction

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits when a state court may hear a case against an out-of-state defendant.¹ In Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S.A. v. Brown, the Supreme Court explained that the decisions following International Shoe Co. v. Washington sort the answer into two categories: general, or all-purpose, jurisdiction and specific, or case-linked, jurisdiction.² The two ask for very different things from the defendant and the forum, and everything later in this chapter depends on keeping them apart.

General jurisdiction turns on the defendant's relationship with the forum and ignores the claim. A court may assert it over a foreign corporation, whether from a sister state or another country, to hear any and all claims against the corporation when its affiliations with the state are so “continuous and systematic” as to render it essentially at home in the forum.³ The claim need not touch the state at all. Since the forum cannot point to the events in suit as the reason for its power, the reason must come from the corporation's own ties to the forum.

Specific jurisdiction turns on the claim. It depends on an affiliation between the forum and the underlying controversy, principally activity or an occurrence in the forum state that the state may therefore regulate, and it reaches only issues connected with that controversy.⁴ The suit must arise out of or relate to the defendant's contacts with the forum, the formulation the Court took from Helicopteros Nacionales de Colombia, S.A. v. Hall.⁵ General jurisdiction measures how extensive the defendant's contacts are and then sets the claim aside; specific jurisdiction measures how the claim relates to the forum, and a few contacts may suffice.⁶

International Shoe sketched both categories before anyone named them. Jurisdiction was clear where a corporation's in-state activity was continuous and systematic and also gave rise to the suit, and the Court added that some single or occasional acts in a state could support jurisdiction over claims about those acts.⁷ Courts now file both situations under specific jurisdiction. Shoe also set apart a different situation, in which continuous operations within the state are so substantial that suit is justified on causes of action arising from dealings entirely distinct from those activities; that category is now called general jurisdiction.⁸ Helicopteros adopted the distinction as a device for handling the “contacts” step of Shoe's contacts-plus-fairness test,⁹ and it supplied both labels in its footnotes.¹⁰ Because Shoe unleashed a rapid expansion of jurisdiction over claims tied to the forum, specific jurisdiction became the centerpiece of modern theory and general jurisdiction played a reduced role.¹¹ Since 2011, the Court has taken a much more restrictive approach to general jurisdiction, and its decisions on the subject occupy the rest of this chapter.¹²

Daimler AG v. Bauman shows the line operating on real facts. Twenty-two Argentine residents sued Daimler, a German company, in federal court in California over alleged human-rights abuses in Argentina. No part of the conduct had any California connection, so the plaintiffs had to invoke general jurisdiction.¹³ Their counsel confirmed how far the theory reached: if a Daimler-manufactured vehicle overturned in Poland and injured a Polish driver and passenger, the injured parties could bring a design-defect suit in California.¹⁴ The Court held that exercises of jurisdiction so exorbitant violate due process.¹⁵ A California plaintiff injured in a California accident involving a Daimler vehicle would present a different problem, because the court's authority would rest on specific jurisdiction.¹⁶

The same kind of contact, a drive through a state, supports jurisdiction when it produces the injury sued upon and does nothing when the claim concerns something else. A single defendant can therefore be reachable in one forum for one claim and in another forum for a different claim, and the analysis asks two questions: does the claim grow out of a forum contact, and is the defendant at home in the forum? The Damage suit in Ohio satisfies only the second, the Demo contract suit in Massachusetts satisfies neither, and the Demo collision suit in Massachusetts satisfies only the first.

The contacts themselves fall along a spectrum. A defendant with no forum contacts is beyond the court's reach unless it consents, and casual or isolated contacts do not change that. A single act of the right quality and nature supports jurisdiction only over claims arising from that act. General jurisdiction sits at the far end, where in-state operations are so substantial that any claim may be heard.¹⁹

Two reasons for requiring contacts at all explain why the categories demand such different amounts of them. First, a defendant that exercises the privilege of conducting activities in a state can fairly be made to answer for what arises out of those activities. Second, defendants control where they direct their conduct, and that control lets them predict, or avoid, exposure to suit in a distant forum.²⁰ For specific jurisdiction, a single contact can satisfy both reasons, because the claim itself ties the dispute to the forum and the defendant could have foreseen or avoided the litigation.

General jurisdiction has no such tie in the claim, so it demands much more extensive contacts, and minimum contacts do not suffice.²¹ The justification is a symmetry between privilege and exposure: a defendant so integrated into a state's economic life that it resembles a citizen can fairly be expected to defend there even when the dispute arose elsewhere.²² Defending at home is also not much of a burden, and a defendant that is at home is arguably within the state's territory, which is where a court's power has traditionally rested.²³

One question therefore controls the rest of this chapter: is the defendant essentially at home in the forum? For an individual, the paradigm home is the domicile. For a corporation, it is an equivalent place where the corporation is fairly regarded as at home, such as its place of incorporation or its principal place of business.²⁴ The next sections take the individual first and then the corporation, and they show how far the Court has narrowed the corporate version of the test.

The phrase “general jurisdiction” has a second meaning that must not be confused with the first. State trial courts of broad authority are also called courts of general jurisdiction, and there the phrase means broad subject-matter jurisdiction over many types of suits, unless a specialized court or exclusive federal jurisdiction takes the dispute away.²⁵ In the personal-jurisdiction sense, it means the authority of a state's courts to hear any claim against a particular defendant, whether or not the claim relates to the defendant's in-state contacts.²⁶ One usage asks what kinds of cases a court may decide, and the other asks whether the court has power over this defendant. A court of general subject-matter jurisdiction therefore gains nothing toward personal jurisdiction from its label.