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

By James H. Rotondo, John W. Cerreta and David W.S. Lieberman

The Supreme Court's recent decision in Daimler AG v. Bauman, 134 S. Ct. 746 (2014), announced a sweeping change to the law of personal jurisdiction. The Daimler Court held that a corporate defendant is subject to general personal jurisdiction ' jurisdiction over suits unrelated to the defendant's contacts with the forum ' only where the corporation may fairly be “regarded as at home,” which is generally limited to the defendant's state of incorporation and the state where it has its principal place of business. Id. at 760-61 & n.19. In announcing this strict standard, the Daimler Court rejected the rule, long applied by many lower courts, permitting the exercise of general jurisdiction in any forum where a corporate defendant maintained an office or was otherwise “doing business.” Id. at 761-62 & n.20.

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.

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