Everything we talked about in our last lesson, in terms of Pennoyer, that is, a court can have personal jurisdiction over you if you either consent to it or waive your objection to it, if you're from that state, which is today what we would say is you're domiciled in that state, or if you're served with process in that state, all of that is still good law.

Those are still ways in which a court can absolutely have personal jurisdiction over you. But there was a problem with that old Pennoyer framework. To show you what the problem was, I'm going to bring in a super cheesy hypothetical.

Limits of Pennoyer

So let's imagine that I go out to dinner tonight. I do this where I'm from, North Carolina, and then someone at the restaurant, let's call her Heather, happens to overhear my conversation, and she finds out that I'm a civil procedure professor. Let's imagine she had a terrible time in Civ Pro. So she stands up and says, "I hate all civil procedure professors," and punches me in the nose. Let's imagine at this point that I decide I'm going to sue Heather for assault, battery, you name it, but let's also imagine that Heather is actually from California and she decides to fly home the next day.

Well, under the old Pennoyer rules, I could only sue Heather where I'm from, that is, in North Carolina, if she consented, well, that's not seeming so likely; if she's domiciled here, well, we know that's not true; or if she could be served with process here. Well, that's also not seeming so likely. We know she just went back to California.

So, what did that mean? That meant that to sue this person, in this case, Heather, who just punched me, I would have to go all the way to California. And the real problem is that I might just not bring my lawsuit at that point. It might just be too burdensome on me.

And you can see that while these rules might've generally made sense in the 1800s, the more that we have interstate commerce and interstate travel, the more these kinds of strict limitations started to become a problem.

So that's where International Shoe comes in. And what International Shoe did was not change those bases for personal jurisdiction, the ones that we've just been talking about. Those are still roughly in place. But it added a new way to establish personal jurisdiction.

International Shoe Test

And here's what it said. It said, and I think this is pretty intuitive, the defendant needs to have some minimum contacts with the state, and it said that the exercise of personal jurisdiction needs to be consistent with what we call "fair play and substantial justice."

Fair Play and Substantial Justice

We're going to break these two pieces down just a bit. And I want to start with the second one. So, when it comes to the bar exam, you need to be aware of that phrase, that "fair play and substantial justice," lurking in the background. What do we mean by that? Basically, that's the way for the court to have a kind of reasonableness check on the exercise of personal jurisdiction.

We want to make sure that it really will be fair to have the defendant hauled into court to defend himself or herself or itself. So what does that kind of reasonableness check look like today? Well, you're going to be thinking about in the background, if we have this lawsuit here in the forum state, is that going to be particularly burdensome on the defendant?

You also may be thinking about things like efficiency. Is this a place where the witnesses are, for example? Is the evidence going to be here or located somewhere else? You're also going to be thinking about the state's interest in all of this. So does the forum state have a particular interest in these parties? Are the parties citizens of that state, for example, such that they might really care about them in particular?

These are the kinds of things kind of lurking in the background. But let me be really clear about this.

Minimum Contacts

Most questions on the exam are really going to be focused instead on that first condition that we identified, namely, does the defendant have the necessary minimum contacts with the forum state?

So here is what the court in International Shoe said we care about when it comes to minimum contacts. So, first, it said we really care about how much contact the defendant has with the forum state. And specifically, does the defendant have just, say, a single isolated contact with the forum? Or, all the way on the other end of the spectrum, does the defendant have what we would call systematic and continuous contact with the forum?

So, just to bring it back to our favorite hypo, if Dave has never been to Alaska, it really doesn't seem fair to drag him there for that lawsuit with Patty. We might feel really differently about that if it turns out that Dave spends like six months out of the year in Alaska. So we care about his contacts to the state, how much contact does he have?

And then second, the court noted that we care about whether those contacts are related to the lawsuit. To put that slightly differently, did the lawsuit arise from those contacts or not? And I think that that also makes sense. Imagine we change our hypothetical just a little bit. If Dave goes to Alaska for a week-long vacation and causes an accident with Patty while he's there, we would think, "Well, yeah, it's not so unfair, actually, to bring him there to defend himself in court in that state."

Well, let's imagine that the car accident takes place in New York, where we first set it, and Patty has flown there for a trip with some friends. Now, Dave, after a week-long vacation in Alaska with his family, also goes to New York and crashes his car into Patty's. Now, note that the contact that Dave has with the state of Alaska is the same in both hypotheticals, that is, he happened to be in Alaska for about a week on a family vacation.

It's just that in the first scenario, that contact is directly related to the lawsuit, whereas in the second one, it's not at all related to the lawsuit. The events that gave rise to the lawsuit, namely, the car crash, happened in a totally different forum, namely, the state of New York.

So you can see just based on that, it feels like, yeah, actually not so unfair for him to be sued in Alaska if he caused the car accident in Alaska, his contact is related to the suit. But, it starts to feel a lot less fair if he has that same contact, but it's totally unrelated to the lawsuit.

Recap

So let's just step back and try to pull all these pieces together. Let's imagine we have a defendant who's not from the forum state, who doesn't consent to suit in the forum state, and who's not around to be served with process in the forum state.

So, in other words, none of those Pennoyer ways of establishing personal jurisdiction are going to work. The thrust of International Shoe is that you might still be able to get personal jurisdiction over the defendant if the defendant has the right kinds of contacts with the forum state. That was a huge innovation to come out of International Shoe, and out of that, really, sprang today what we think of as two different types of personal jurisdiction, namely, specific jurisdiction and general jurisdiction. And that's what we're talking about in our next lesson.