My Akron colleague Bernadette Bollas Genetin recently posted “The Supreme Court's New Approach to Personal Jurisdiction” on SSRN, and I believe it may be of interest to readers of this blog.  Here is the abstract:     

This article provides an analysis of the Court’s two recent personal jurisdiction opinions, Daimler AG v. Bauman, 134 S. Ct. 746 (2014), and Walden v. Fiore, 134 S. Ct. 1115 (2014), and concludes that these cases suggest a new doctrinal approach to personal jurisdiction.

In Daimler AG v. Bauman, the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of general jurisdiction, making it available primarily in a corporation’s states of incorporation and principal place of business and rejecting, in most instances, the prior approach of permitting general jurisdiction based on a defendant’s “continuous and systematic” forum contacts. In Walden v. Fiore, the Court used an interest balancing approach to resolve the specific jurisdiction question at issue, turning away from its longstanding purposeful availment approach.

Together, these cases can be interpreted to reinvigorate the reasonableness analysis of International Shoe, in which the Court focused on the “relation among the defendant, the forum, and the litigation.” The Supreme Court has, famously, reversed course several times on its analysis of personal jurisdiction. The article concludes that the Court should, in the full range of specific jurisdiction cases, return to an analysis that considers all relevant interests, including the interests of the defendant, the plaintiff, and the state.