Keep the Home Fires Burning: The Enduring Embers of Pennsylvania Fire

Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Ford Motor Co. in 2021, what characterized the Court’s personal jurisdiction jurisprudence was a desire to restrict access to the courts for plaintiffs seeking redress for injuries and to protect large corporate defendants by limiting the available jurisdictions in which they could be sued. For example, in Daimler, the Court rejected the traditional understanding of general jurisdiction based on a defendant corporation’s activities within the forum state and, in so doing, turned years of lower court decisions developing the understanding of general jurisdiction on its head. However, more recently, the Court has begun to realize how its overly restrictive approach to personal jurisdiction has unnecessarily prejudiced individual plaintiffs and benefited corporate defendants. In Ford, for example, the Court indicated that a finding that a court had specific personal jurisdiction over a corporate defendant did not require a causal relationship between the defendant’s contact with the forum and the injury giving rise to the cause of action. Rather, the Court noted that the analysis for specific jurisdiction had always required either that the cause of action arise out of the defendant’s contacts with the forum or that the cause of action be closely related to the cause of action. In Ford, the Court, for the first time, put some meat on the bones of the “closely related” prong of specific jurisdiction analysis, thus expanding the reasons under which a court might find it has personal jurisdiction over an out-of-state corporate defendant. More recently, in Mallory, the Supreme Court revisited the issue of whether compliance with state corporate registration statutes may connote consent on the part of a corporation to the exercise of personal jurisdiction. This was the first time since its 1917 decision in Pennsylvania Fire that the Court addressed the issue. The decision in Mallory warrants a renewed look at the question of consent to personal jurisdiction by corporate registration. In Mallory, the Court also further addressed the problems raised by its restrictive approach to personal jurisdiction. This Article traces the historical development of the Court’s personal jurisdiction jurisprudence, from the territorial limitations of Pennoyer v. Neff rooted in understanding the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the abandonment of this overly restrictive approach and the establishment of the modern development of the personal jurisdiction doctrine in International Shoe Co. v. Washington. This Article then reviews the concept of registration-based consent to personal jurisdiction from Pennsylvania Fire to the recent decision in Mallory, which found that this application of consent was not a due process violation. In conclusion, the Article examines the preconditions for the imposition of registration-based consent to personal jurisdiction and the limitations imposed by the Dormant Commerce Clause on the reach of registration-based consent to personal jurisdiction.