We’ve blogged about the United States Supreme Court’s pending personal jurisdiction cases before. Well, they pend no longer. Yesterday the Court unanimously (with a couple of concurrences) ruled that resident plaintiffs injured by products originally manufactured and sold elsewhere could sue a nationwide company like Ford – that “purposefully avail[ed] itself of the privilege
As we write this, there is great uncertainty in the country. The intersection of state and federal law is a focus, as is the possibility that one or more of the many recent challenges to how states count votes for the presidential election will end up in the Supreme Court. The tension is palpable, in
We have an update today on a case from Idaho on which we blogged late last year. The issue then was innovator liability, and we gave our enthusiastic stamp of approval to the court’s rejection of “product liability” where the innovator manufacturer neither made nor sold the product that allegedly harmed the plaintiff. As the
For as long as we’ve been practicing law, litigation tourists plaintiffs, from far and wide, have flocked to bring suit in the downstate Illinois counties of Madison and St. Clair, despite their claims having nothing to do with the state of Illinois. Yesterday, the Illinois Supreme Court – in Essure litigation – recognized that this
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
Missouri courts keep showing us surprisingly good things on the personal jurisdiction front. In Mitchell v. DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc., 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 92621 (W.D. Missouri June 3, 2019), the plaintiff twice had a knee replacement implant while she lived in Kansas, then sued in Missouri, claiming that, after she moved there, that is
Bexis is going to have to give up saying that nothing good ever comes out of Missouri, because for the second time in just a few months we are reporting on a well-reasoned opinion from Missouri that comes to the right result for the right reasons. In Fullerton v. Smith & Nephew, Inc., No.
Happy birthday, Bob Marley. (We mean the transcendent reggae singer, not the Maine comedian.) Now let’s get together and feel alright about another good personal jurisdiction decision, In re Pradaxa, No. CJC-16-004863 (Cal. Super. Ct. Jan. 31, 2019). The case strikes a blow against California litigation tourism. There were some awful decisions out of
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.
Continue Reading M.D. Pa. Finds No Specific Personal Jurisdiction over Parent Company
Recently, we offered a detailed breaking news post about how the California Supreme Court had messed up its jurisdictional analysis in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court, — P.3d — (Ca. 2016), even worse than the California Court of Appeal had two years earlier. We have taken a few whacks at this BMS