D.C. Circuit Holds Fuld Does Not Apply to District of Columbia

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In July, the D.C. Circuit (Judge Justin Walker) held that the local courts of the District of Columbia are still constrained by the minimum contacts test for personal jurisdiction derived from International Shoe Co. v. Washington (1945) and not by the “more flexible” test permitted by the Fifth Amendment after Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization (2025).

Fuld held that the personal jurisdiction framework derived from International Shoe is specific to the Fourteenth Amendment, which binds the states, and should not be imported into the Fifth Amendment, which binds the federal government. Because the District of Columbia is a federal enclave, it is constrained by the Fifth Amendment, not the Fourteenth. The D.C. Circuit held in Akhmetshin v. Browder that the Fourteenth Amendment framework nonetheless continues to apply to the District of Columbia. The decision surfaces tensions between different approaches to personal jurisdiction that Fuld tried to suppress. After summarizing the decision, this post proposes three possible ways to resolve some of those tensions.

From the Magnitsky Act to Trump Tower

The background of Akhmetshin, like that of Fuld, implicates high politics and foreign policy. It all began with the death in Russian custody of Sergei Magnitsky, an auditor for the Russian hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management. Sir William Browder, founder of Hermitage and a British citizen, was convinced Magnitsky was murdered for uncovering a tax-fraud scheme implicating Russian officials, and he lobbied Congress to adopt what became known as the Magnitsky Act, which authorizes the President to impose sanctions against individuals in other countries who commit human rights abuses. (The initial Act, adopted in 2012, was focused on Magnitsky’s murder and limited to Russia, but an expanded version with global reach was adopted in 2016. Other countries have since adopted similar acts.)

Rinat Akhmetshin, a dual citizen of Russia and the United States who resides in the District of Columbia, is an expert on the former Soviet Union and works as a consultant and lobbyist. He undertook to disprove Browder’s version of the events surrounding Magnitsky’s death, including by lobbying Congress and hosting a screening of a documentary that offered a counternarrative. In 2017, it was widely reported that Akhmetshin and others met with Donald Trump, Jr., at Trump Tower in New York City. In two tweets and two interviews (with Business Insider and CBS This Morning), Browder described Akhmetshin in connection with this meeting as a Russian operative. In particular, duringthe CBS interview, Browder said Akhmetshin was “by all accounts, some kind of shady former Soviet spy, current spy operator in Washington.”

Akhmetshin sued Browder in federal court in D.C. for defamation based on local D.C. law. Because the case did not involve a question of federal law, the federal court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction relied on Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(k)(1)(A) and was thus limited to the personal jurisdiction that the D.C. local courts could exercise.

That raised a new question post-Fuld because the District of Columbia is not a state bound by the Fourteenth Amendment but rather a federal enclave bound by the Fifth Amendment. Are the constitutional limits on D.C.’s exercise of personal jurisdiction nonetheless the same limits as those imposed under the Fourteenth Amendment on states? The D.C. Circuit’s answer was firm and clear: even after Fuld, “D.C. local courts must apply the minimum-contacts test from International Shoe.”

The Court’s Reasoning

The D.C. Circuit emphasized Fuld’s “sovereign-by-sovereign” analysis. Fuld’s reasoning, it explained, turned on the difference between the territorially bounded sovereignty of the states and the “nationwide and extraterritorial authority” of the United States (quoting Fuld). The D.C. Circuit summarized Fuld as explaining that “[t]he International Shoe test for state court exercises of personal jurisdiction ‘emerged’ from that sovereign-by-sovereign analysis”—not from the difference between the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Similarly, “the territorial limits International Shoe imposes ‘on the authority of state courts’ cannot apply to federal courts” because of the federal government’s broader scope of sovereignty—not, the D.C. Circuit implied, because of any inherent difference between the two Due Process Clauses. “Fuld did not purport to adopt a global Fifth Amendment test for personal jurisdiction,” the circuit court reasoned; rather, it “rejected International Shoe not primarily because the Fifth Amendment was involved, but because a categorically different sovereign was involved.” Applying the Fourteenth Amendment framework, the court then determined that personal jurisdiction over Browder was lacking and affirmed dismissal on that basis.

What Akhmetshin Might Mean for Fuld

I don’t think the D.C. Circuit was wrong in its ultimate conclusion, but I do think its reasoning is in some tension with Fuld. Fuld may have relied on a functional analysis, but its holding was phrased more starkly in terms of the Fifth vs. Fourteenth Amendment: it “decline[d] to import the Fourteenth Amendment minimum contacts standard into the Fifth Amendment,” for example, and it “made clear that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment does not incorporate the Fourteenth Amendment minimum contacts standard.” Akhmetshin’s functional analysis is also difficult to square with formalist or originalist approaches that would not so easily blur the distinction between the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Indeed, I find Akhmetshin intriguing precisely because it brings into sharper relief the underlying theoretical disagreements about the nature and limits of personal jurisdiction—disagreements that Fuld’s rather cryptic opinion managed (just barely) to paper over. Here are three possibilities for filling out the reasoning of Akhmetshin in a way that continues Fuld’s jurisprudential balancing act.

Option 1: Congress Must Speak Clearly

The court could have drawn from Fuld a presumption that Congress does not intend to authorize the full scope of federal personal jurisdiction under the Fifth Amendment unless it explicitly says so. In the statute at issue in Fuld, it did. In empowering the local D.C. government to adopt its own long-arm statue and in setting up the D.C. local courts, it did not. The Fourteenth Amendment minimum contacts analysis applies to D.C. as a background default, not because it is constitutionally required—Congress could still specify otherwise for D.C., up to the limits of the Fifth Amendment.

I personally don’t love this reading of Fuld, however, because I’m not sure how the default application of the Fourteenth Amendment framework can be justified if not by the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause itself. We also don’t have a good way to articulate what the outer limits on Congress’s ability to override this default might be (assuming there are any). In other words, this approach either reads multiple tests into the Due Process Clause, or—more likely—requires accepting that Congress can displace whatever test the Due Process Clause entails.

Option 2: It’s a Functional Analysis All the Way Down

My preferred approach would be to acknowledge that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments involve the same due process limit on personal jurisdiction, but that the analysis just cashes out differently depending on the sovereign to which the Due Process Clause applies. What the Supreme Court refused to import into the Fifth Amendment was not International Shoe full stop, but the “Fourteenth Amendment minimum contacts standard” that is “derive[d] from” International Shoe. As I have explained in other writings, the Supreme Court has built elaborate scaffolding on top of International Shoe that it has said is necessitated by horizontal federalism concerns—what I have taken to calling the “Fourteenth Amendment algorithm.” It’s the algorithm that the Court held did not apply to the Fifth Amendment, not necessarily International Shoe’s underlying standard of connection and reasonableness.

On this reading of Fuld, the limit imposed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment is the same, but it is a standard that can account for the broader interests of the federal government, on the one hand, and the need for U.S. states to not step on the toes of other U.S. states, on the other. It thus looks like the Fourteenth Amendment algorithm when applied via the Fourteenth Amendment to state courts, like Fuld when applied via the Fifth Amendment to explicit federal statutes, and like Akhmetshin (i.e., the Fourteenth Amendment algorithm again) when applied via the Fifth Amendment to territories and the District of Columbia.

Option 3: An Originalist Rationale

Finally, I think there is a way to justify Akhmetshin’s holding that might satisfy originalists who agree with Professor Stephen Sachs’s theory of unlimited federal personal jurisdiction. One of the early cases relied on by Sachs and like-minded jurists is Ex Parte Graham (C.C. E.D. Pa. 1818). I’ve explained before why I think their reliance on Ex Parte Graham is puzzling at best. But I do think that case’s reasoning is informative here: In Ex Parte Graham, Justice Washington riding circuit reasoned that Congress, in dividing the federal judicial power into separate districts, intended courts operating within those districts to be territorially bounded in their power. Congress could have given the district courts nationwide authority, he reasoned, but the choice to create territorially bounded districts implied it did not wish to do so.

That same reasoning could explain why territorially bounded federal enclaves like the District of Columbia—even if constrained only by the Fifth Amendment and even if the personal jurisdiction limits under the Fifth Amendment are intrinsically different from those under the Fourteenth—would nonetheless be territorially restricted in the jurisdiction they can exercise, at least in the absence of more explicit guidance from Congress.

Conclusion

I doubt many would argue with Akhmetshin’s pragmatic result. But I think the question it addresses forces a deeper reckoning with the unfinished business of Fuld, which assiduously avoided taking sides in underlying theoretical debates.