Editing Personal jurisdiction (section)

=== General v. specific ===

In the 21st century, the Supreme Court began to develop an important distinction between specific and general forms of personal jurisdiction.  In the 2011 case of ''[[Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S. A. v. Brown]]'', Justice Ginsburg in her opinion for a unanimous court held that for a forum state to exercise general personal jurisdiction over claims that do not arise out of or relate to the defendant's actual contacts with the state, the defendant's contacts with the state must be so systematic and continuous that the defendant may be regarded as "essentially at home" in the state.  This holding was reaffirmed in 2014 by the Supreme Court in ''[[Daimler AG v. Bauman]]'' and again in 2017 in ''[[BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell]]''.

This series of landmark cases implied that general personal jurisdiction cannot be constitutionally asserted over most corporate defendants outside of the states in which they are incorporated or headquartered.  This left plaintiffs in most cases with specific personal jurisdiction, which rests upon whether the plaintiff's claims "arise out of or relate to" the defendant's contacts to the forum state.  In  ''[[Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court]]'' (2017), the Supreme Court held that in consolidated mass tort complex litigation in state courts, out-of-state plaintiffs cannot piggyback on in-state plaintiffs' claims to establish the forum state's jurisdiction over the defendant because the out-of-state plaintiffs' claims do not "arise out of or relate to" the defendant's contacts with the forum.  

However, in ''[[Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial Dist.]]'' (2021), the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the phrase "arise out of or relate to" requires plaintiffs to show direct causation between the defendant's forum contacts and their claims (i.e., that the plaintiffs actually bought allegedly defective cars in the forum state because of the defendant's marketing in that state).  Rather, to exercise specific personal jurisdiction, it is sufficient for the plaintiff to show that the defendant's contacts were systematic enough to establish a "strong relationship among the defendant, the forum, and the litigation", such that the defendant was on notice that it could be sued in the forum state.