Personal Jurisdiction as a Mandatory Rule

Abstract

For the past decade, the Supreme Court has consistently admonished the bench and bar that rules delineating the scope of federal jurisdiction must not be confused with emphatic, but non-jurisdictional, bars to judicial review. Whether a particular rule falls on one side of the jurisdictional divide or the other has presented a difficult question. In a recent article, Scott Dodson proposes that there are a class of rules - "mandatory rules" - that while not jurisdictional in the strict sense now employed by the Supreme Court, nonetheless possess some jurisdictional characteristics. In this Essay, I suggest that personal jurisdiction is one such mandatory rule. That is, I suggest that under the logic now employed by the Supreme Court, personal jurisdiction is not "jurisdiction" at all. Limiting the jurisdictional label to subject-matter jurisdiction will facilitate terminological and conceptual clarity in what has become a confused field.