General Jurisdiction After <i>Daimler AG v. Bauman</i>

At least initially, Daimler was understood by many to have signaled the end of “doing business” as a basis for general, “all-purpose” jurisdiction. But since Daimler, a number of courts have issued decisions that, if widely adopted, would resurrect the “doing business” standard under another name, and would reduce the Supreme Court's “at-home” requirement to a nullity. According to these courts, whenever an out-of-state corporation registers to do business with a secretary of state and appoints an agent for service of process, that defendant consents to general jurisdiction over all disputes brought in the courts of the forum state, regardless of whether the corporation is “at home” in that state. This sort of reasoning is, in our view, both foreclosed by Daimler and based on a theory of consent that is at odds with decades of personal-jurisdiction jurisprudence under International Shoe Co. v. Washington. As a result, and as explained herein, courts should reject this consent-based theory of general jurisdiction and instead apply the “at home” standard expressly adopted in Daimler.