California courts continue to find ways to exercise personal jurisdiction over out-of-state defendants, even when there is little or no dispute that the Constitution and the United States Supreme Court’s opinion in Bristol-Meyers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court do not permit it. “Resistance” is probably too strong a word, insofar as it calls up images
Today’s post looks at a case where a defendant was in the wrong place. You might say the same thing about us. As you read this, we are on summer holiday. Because our vacation almost always takes place, as it does this year, during the Drug and Device Son’s birthday, he has veto power over
Last week business took us to South Florida. Thank you business, as it was 50 degrees warmer in Miami than it was in our frigid Philly suburb. We always love the Sunshine State, but we especially love it in January and February. We love it, even though Florida is the target of many barbs about
A federal court in Utah ruled the other day that it had no personal jurisdiction over a corporate parent, even though the plaintiffs alleged that the defendant subsidiary was the “alter ego” of its owner. We read the order with great interest for a couple of reasons. First, one of our first assignments out of
Not so long ago the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas emitted a malodorous opinion exercising personal jurisdiction over a foreign corporation because one of its materials suppliers was in Pennsylvania, even though the quality of that supplied material seemed to have nothing much to do with the injury, which occurred outside Pennsylvania. That opinion seems
A case from Alabama this week got us to thinking about two topics on which we write a lot — innovator liability and personal jurisdiction. We thought the most interesting part of Bexis’ recent post on innovator liability was its suggestion that innovators sued over the use of generic drugs should consider objecting to jurisdiction.
We have written a lot about personal jurisdiction and class actions, and we have particularly questioned how, after BMS, anyone could proceed with a nationwide class action applying state law in a forum where there is no general personal jurisdiction over the defendant. We are not the only ones posing this question, but as
With a little luck on our part, by the time you read this we will be vacationing in a sunnier clime. Our beachfront cottage is an Oddjob’s hat-toss away from where Ian Fleming wrote the James Bond novels. Mind you, we are not pretending to be serving On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. If anything, with
Not all personal jurisdiction cases coming out of Pennsylvania are bad. To be sure, an ED Pa judge’s recent embrace of the consent theory to get around Bauman was bad news – almost as bad as Philadelphia 76ers soon-to-be superstar Ben Simmons’s foot injury. Happily, a much better opinion arrived last week: Baker v. Livanova PLC et al., No. 1:16-cv-00260 (M.D. Pa. Sept. 29, 2016). The author was Judge John E. Jones, the same judge who presided over the intelligent design case a couple of years ago. Judge Jones has a reputation for being smart and trying to get things right, and the Baker decision won’t hurt that reputation one bit.
Baker is a putative class action, seeking medical monitoring based on an allegation that a heater-cooler system for regulating blood temperature during open heart surgeries exposed patients to a nasty bacterium. In addition to suing companies that the court calls “Sorin” and “Sorin USA,” the plaintiffs also sued the parent company, LivaNova PLC, which is incorporated and headquartered in the United Kingdom. The issue was whether there was personal jurisdiction over LivaNova. (Sorin and Sorin USA did not contest personal jurisdiction.) The plaintiffs said there was specific jurisdiction over LivaNova based on: (1) LivaNova’s contacts with Pennsylvania regarding the heater-cooler system, (2) LivaNova functioned as the alter ego of its subsidiaries, and (3) the almost ancient case of Worldwide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson, 444 U.S. 286 (1980), placed distributors on the jurisdictional hook. Note that general jurisdiction was not at issue, so the lovely Bauman case does not make even a cameo appearance. Then again, neither does the Walden case, which was decided by SCOTUS around the same time as Bauman and which says very important things about specific jurisdiction. But even without discussing Walden, Judge Jones addresses plaintiffs’ argument correctly and coherently. You might even say that the Baker case has an intelligent design.