scholarly journals Plaintiff Personal Jurisdiction and Venue Transfer

2019 ◽  
pp. 1463
Author(s):  
Scott Dodson

Personal jurisdiction usually focuses on the rights of the defendant. This is because a plaintiff implicitly consents to personal jurisdiction in the court where the plaintiff chooses to file. But what if the defendant seeks to transfer venue to a court in a state in which the plaintiff has no contacts and never consented to personal jurisdiction? Lower courts operate on the assumption that in both ordinary venue-transfer cases under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a) and multidistrict-litigation cases under § 1407(a), personal-jurisdiction concerns for plaintiffs simply do not apply. I contest that assumption. Neither statute expands the statutory authorization of federal-court personal jurisdiction. And theories based on implied consent stretch that notion too far. Personal jurisdiction legitimately can treat plaintiffs and defendants differently, but those differences call for nuance and fact dependency, not a blanket exemption for plaintiffs from personal-jurisdiction protections. This Essay reestablishes plaintiff-side personal jurisdiction by articulating and justifying the standard for protecting the due process rights of plaintiffs subject to interstate venue transfer without their express consent.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Schlanger

103 Cornell L. Rev. 357 (2018)As American incarcerated populations grew starting in the 1970s, so too did court oversight of prisons. In the late 1980s, however, as incarceration continued to boom, federal court oversight shrank. This Article addresses the most central doctrinal limit on oversight of jails and prisons, the Supreme Court’s restrictive reading of the constitutional provisions governing treatment of prisoners — the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause and the Due Process Clause, which regulate, respectively, post-conviction imprisonment and pretrial detention. The Court’s interpretation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban of cruel and unusual punishment, in particular, radically undermined prison officials’ accountability for tragedies behind bars — allowing, even encouraging, them to avoid constitutional accountability. And lower courts compounded the error by importing that reading into Due Process doctrine as well. In 2015, in Kingsley v. Hendrickson, a jail use of force case, the Court relied on 1970s precedent, not subsequent caselaw that had placed undue emphasis on the subjective culpability of prison and jail officials as the crucial source of constitutional concern. The Kingsley Court returned to a more appropriate objective analysis. In finding for the plaintiff, the Supreme Court unsettled the law far past Kingsley’s direct factual setting of pretrial detention, expressly inviting post-conviction challenges to restrictive — and incoherent — Eighth Amendment caselaw. The Court rejected not only the defendants’ position, but the logic that underlies 25 years of pro-government outcomes in prisoners’ rights cases. But commentary and developing caselaw since Kingsley has not fully recognized its implications. I argue that both doctrinal logic and justice dictate that constitutional litigation should center on the experience of incarcerated prisoners, rather than the culpability of their keepers. The takeaway of my analysis is that the Constitution is best read to impose governmental liability for harm caused to prisoners — whether pretrial or post-conviction — by unreasonably dangerous conditions of confinement and unjustified uses of force. In this era of mass incarceration, our jails and prisons should not be shielded from accountability by legal standards that lack both doctrinal and normative warrant.


Author(s):  
Scott Burris ◽  
Micah L. Berman ◽  
Matthew Penn, and ◽  
Tara Ramanathan Holiday

This chapter describes “due process,” a Constitutional restriction on governmental actions that impact individuals, in the context of public health. It outlines the doctrines of procedural and substantive due process, including the legal tests that courts apply to decide whether individuals’ due process rights have been violated. It uses examples from Supreme Court cases that have defined due process in the context of public health, including those that struggle to define the scope of reproductive rights. It also examines two cases where public health principles were raised as a justification for governmental action: one about involuntary sterilization and one about Ebola. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the “state action doctrine” that defines which public health actors may be challenged on due process grounds.


2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 8-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aileen Gelpi

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annemarie Bridy

In the years since passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), the copyright industries have demanded that online intermediaries - both those covered by the DMCA and those falling outside the statute's ambit - do more than the law requires to protect their intellectual property rights. In particular, they have sought new ways to reach and shutter "pirate sites" beyond the reach of United States law. Their demands have been answered through an expanding regime of nominally voluntary "DMCA-plus" enforcement.This chapter surveys the current landscape of DMCA-plus enforcement by dividing such enforcement into two categories: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 DMCA-plus enforcement is cooperation by DMCA-covered intermediaries over and above what is required for safe harbor. Type 2 DMCA-plus enforcement is cooperation by intermediaries whose activities fall outside the scope of the DMCA's safe harbors and who are not liable for their customers' copyright infringements under secondary liability rules.As the gap widens between what the law requires and what intermediaries are agreeing to do on a voluntary basis, there is reason to be concerned about the expressive and due process rights of users and website operators, who have no seat at the table when intermediaries and copyright owners negotiate "best practices" for mitigating online infringement, including which sanctions to impose, which content to remove, and which websites to block without judicial intervention.Annemarie BridyProfessor<http://www.uidaho.edu/law/faculty/annemariebridy>|University of Idaho College of Law|PO Box 83720-0051|Boise, ID 83720|Ph. 208.364.4583Affiliate Scholar<https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/people/annemarie-bridy>|Stanford Center for Internet and SocietyAffiliate Fellow<http://isp.yale.edu/people-directory?type=19>|Yale Information Society ProjectSSRN<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=630766>|HeinOnline<http://heinonline.org/HOL/AuthorProfile?collection=journals&search_name=Bridy,%20Annemarie&base=js>|LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/in/annemariebridy>|Twitter<https://twitter.com/AnnemarieBridy>


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 501-528
Author(s):  
Peter Kuylen

With its move to the “at home” standard in Goodyear, Daimler, and BNSF, the Supreme Court significantly restricted the exercise of general personal jurisdiction over nonresident corporation defendants. This restriction offers questionable actual benefits to corporate defendants, but its rigid focus on defendant’s rights has impacted the ability of certain plaintiffs to bring a cause of action against those defendants. Because the at home standard infringes on this group of plaintiffs’ ability to assert their property right of redress in violation of the Due Process Clauses of the Constitution (Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments), the Court should return to the previous “continuous and systematic contacts” standard developed under International Shoe. Hundreds of articles have been written in the four years since Daimler erased fifty years of general personal jurisdiction jurisprudence. But because personal jurisdiction analysis is traditionally defendant focused, there is little mention of the plaintiff’s property right in access to the courts in that literature. Personal jurisdiction rules should protect a defendant’s interests, but not to the total forfeiture of a plaintiff’s property right. Recognizing the at home standard as a misstep would resolve this constitutional conflict.


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