Seventh Circuit Limits Email Service on Foreign Defendants
June 2, 2026
Last Friday, the Seventh Circuit held in Kangol LLC v. Hangzhou Chuanyue Silk Import & Export Co., Ltd. that defendants located in China cannot be served by email when the Hague Service Convention applies. (Disclaimer: Bill Dodge and I filed an amicus in Kangol with the help of friend-of-the-blog Ted Folkman urging this result.) The decision, authored by Judge Thomas Kirsch, is significant for several reasons. It addresses a question that arises often in the Northern District of Illinois, given that the district sees a lot of so-called “Schedule A” litigation in which holders of U.S. intellectual property rights sue a large collection of defendants, often online merchants based in China. That question has divided district courts in the Seventh Circuit and nationally, yet it has evaded appellate review. Luckily, that era is now officially over: Kangol accords with the Second Circuit’s decision last December in Smart Study v. Shenzhenshixindajixieyouxiangongsi and the Third Circuit’s 2024 unpublished opinion in SEC v. Lahr, forming a strong consensus among the circuit courts that have considered the question that the Hague Service Convention is mandatory and exclusive when it applies.
Kangol and “Schedule A” Litigation
Kangol is a classic example of Schedule A litigation: Kangol LLC brought Lanham Act claims against 25 e-commerce defendants, including Hangzhou Chuanyue Silk Import & Export Co., Ltd., who Kangol listed on a Schedule A that was attached to the complaint but filed under seal. It then sought a temporary restraining order against the defendants (which can be issued ex parte pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(b)) and for permission to serve the defendants by email (pursuant to Rule 4(f)(3)), both of which the district court granted.
Immediately after Kangol emailed service to Hangzhou, Hangzhou initiated settlement negotiations with Kangol, but it never appeared in the district court. The district court granted Kangol a default judgment in May 2024, and in early 2025, Kangol succeeded in using the judgment to garnish Hangzhou’s Amazon account. Hangzhou then moved to vacate the default judgment as void because service by email is prohibited by the Hague Service Convention. The district court denied the motion to vacate, but on appeal, the Seventh Circuit reversed and remanded to the district court for further consideration.
The Hague Service Convention Is Mandatory and Exclusive
The Seventh Circuit held clearly and emphatically that the Hague Service Convention is mandatory and exclusive: “The Convention’s text and structure demonstrate that, where it applies, it provides the permissible means of service and excludes all others.” It started with the language of the Convention itself, which in Article I states that it “shall apply in all cases, in civil or commercial matters, where there is occasion to transmit a judicial or extrajudicial document for service abroad.” It flagged that the Supreme Court has repeatedly described the Convention (in light of this language) as mandatory and as setting out the exclusive means of valid service. It further noted that any other reading of the Convention would render other of its provisions superfluous. For example, Article 19 clarifies that the Convention doesn’t override other forms of service authorized under domestic laws, and Article 11 permits countries to separately agree to additional methods of service—provisions that would not be necessary if the Convention did not otherwise foreclose unspecified methods of service. Even if the text of the Convention were not so clear, the Seventh Circuit continued, the drafting history of the Convention and the views of the Executive and of other signatories all support a reading of the Convention as exclusive.
(The Seventh Circuit stopped there, leaving implicit that the Convention’s exclusive character means that Rule 4(f)(3) does not allow judges to authorize other methods of service, as district courts around the country have often presumed. Rule 4(f)(3) permits service on defendants located outside “any judicial district of the United States” “by other means not prohibited by international agreement, as the court orders.” If the Convention is exclusive, then it does prohibit any other means of service for which it does not expressly provide.)
Email Service under the Convention
Because the Convention was adopted in the 1960s, it does not explicitly permit service by email. There is a growing movement to interpret Article 10(a), which permits service “by postal channels,” to include service by email—but as the Seventh Circuit pointed out, that option is foreclosed by China’s objection to service under Article 10(a). That means that “the Hague Service Convention prohibits service by email in China.”
However, there is still a preliminary question of whether the Convention applies to this particular case. Article 1 states that the Convention “shall not apply where the address of the person to be served with the document is not known.” The Seventh Circuit remanded to the district court to determine in the first instance if Kangol was reasonably diligent in trying to ascertain Hangzhou’s physical address. If it could not ascertain Hangzhou’s physical address despite reasonable diligence, then the Convention does not apply, and Rule 4(f)(3) would permit the judge to authorize other forms of service, including service by email.
Conclusion
The Seventh Circuit’s analysis in Kangol was short, direct, and correct. It is reassuring to see a clear consensus forming among the circuit courts. Hopefully district courts nationally will take note.