Toward a Unified Test of Personal Jurisdiction in an Era of Widely Diffused Wrongs: The Relevance of Purpose and Effects

Abstract

The prevalence in modern society of widely diffused wrongs committed by the transmission of information, whether by traditional means or over the Internet, has placed increasing strain on traditional concepts of personal jurisdiction. While the Supreme Court has stayed above the fray, lower federal and state courts struggle to apply older formulations in new contexts. The problems are varied and difficult, leading to closely divided opinions and debatable results and raising new issues of appropriate limits on the sovereign power of the states and fairness to the parties. Courts confronting these and similarly difficult issues of personal jurisdiction in the context of actions for defamation, copyright infringement, unfair competition, and other wrongs having potentially widely dispersed effects have evidenced considerable confusion over what jurisdictional test should be applied in such cases and over the proper interpretation of those tests in new contexts with which they were not designed to deal. No commentator has yet reconciled the various tests, adequately explained the relationship among them, or clearly described the context in which each test should apply. After exploring the confusion created by these various tests, we argue instead for a unified test for personal jurisdiction based on an objective evaluation of the defendant’s activities with regard to the forum state.