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Running On Empty: Ford V. Montana And The Folly Of Minimum Contacts, James P. George

Faculty Scholarship

Jurisdictional contests are in disarray. Criticisms date back to the issuance of International Shoe Co. v. Washington but the breakdown may be best illustrated in two recent Supreme Court opinions, the first rejecting California’s “sliding scale” that mixes general and specific contacts, the second using the discredited sliding scale to hold Ford amenable in states where accidents occurred.

California’s sliding scale is one variety of the contacts-relatedness tests, used in lower courts to have general contacts bolster weaker specific contacts. Some states—Montana and Minnesota for example—use the opposite extreme requiring a causal connection in defendant’s forum contacts, often using foreseeability …

The Lay Of The Land: Examining The Three Opinions In J. Mcintyre Machinery, Ltd. V. Nicastro, Adam N. Steinman

Faculty Scholarship

It was a long time coming. The Supreme Court's decisions last Term in J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro and Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S.A. v. Brown ended a two-decade high-court hiatus from the subject of personal jurisdiction. In McIntyre, the more controversial of the two, the Court concludes that New Jersey state courts lacked jurisdiction over a British manufacturer in a suit by a New Jersey plaintiff who was injured in New Jersey by a machine purchased by his New Jersey employer. McIntyre lacks a majority opinion, however. Instead we have a four-Justice plurality authored by Justice Kennedy, a …

The Meaning Of Mcintyre, Adam N. Steinman

Faculty Scholarship

When certiorari was granted in J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro, 131 S. Ct. 2780 (2011), many hoped that the Supreme Court would provide much-needed clarification to the area of personal jurisdiction. It didn’t. The Court failed to generate a majority opinion, splitting into Justice Kennedy’s four-Justice plurality, Justice Breyer’s two-Justice concurrence, and Justice Ginsburg’s three-Justice dissent.

This essay – for the Southwestern Journal of International Law’s 2012 symposium “Our Courts and the World: Transnational Litigation and Procedure” – examines how state and federal courts have been using the McIntyre decision. Some lower court opinions have mistakenly interpreted McIntyre as …