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How Congress Should Fix Personal Jurisdiction, Stephen E. Sachs
How Congress Should Fix Personal Jurisdiction, Stephen E. Sachs
Faculty Scholarship
Personal jurisdiction is a mess, and only Congress can fix it. The field is a morass, filled with buzzwords of nebulous origin and application. Courts have sought a single doctrine that simultaneously guarantees convenience for plaintiffs, fairness for defendants, and legitimate authority for the tribunal. Caught between these goals, we've let each new fact pattern pull precedent in a different direction, robbing litigants of certainty and blunting the force of our substantive law.
Solving the problem starts with reframing it. Rather than ask where a case may be heard, we should ask who may hear it. If the parties are …
Saving The Federal Circuit, Paul Gugliuzza
Saving The Federal Circuit, Paul Gugliuzza
Faculty Scholarship
In a recent, attention-grabbing speech, the Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit, Diane Wood, argued that Congress should abolish the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction over patent cases. Exclusive jurisdiction, she said, provides too much legal uniformity, which harms the patent system. In this response to Judge Wood’s thoughtful speech, I seek to highlight two important premises underlying her argument, neither of which is indisputably true.
The first premise is that the Federal Circuit actually provides legal uniformity. Judge Wood suggests that, due to the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction, patent doctrine is insufficiently “percolated,” meaning that it lacks mechanisms through which …