D.C. Circuit on Personal Jurisdiction in Foreign-Cubed Cases
The D.C. Circuit (Judge Patricia Millet) recently grappled with the limits of federal personal jurisdiction in a suit between foreign parties regarding events that took place outside the United States. In Gligorov v. Nation of Brunei, the court affirmed the dismissal of RICO claims against three corporate defendants for lack of personal jurisdiction. The opinion…
Continue ReadingFurther Thoughts on Personal Jurisdiction for Helms-Burton Act Claims
Last week, Bill Dodge reported on the Eleventh Circuit’s recent decision in Rodriguez v. Imperial Brands, PLC, in which the court dismissed Helms-Burton Act claims against two British defendants for lack of personal jurisdiction. Bill critiqued the court’s application of Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization (2025), but not the decision’s ultimate outcome. The difficulty with…
Continue ReadingEleventh Circuit Applies Fuld in Helms-Burton Case
On July 23, 2026, in Rodriguez v. Imperial Brands, PLC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld the dismissal for lack of personal jurisdiction of claims against two British corporations under the Helms-Burton Act for trafficking in property expropriated by Cuba. The opinion is one of the first by a circuit court…
Continue ReadingThe Good and the Bad of King v. Bon Charge
The Supreme Court’s latest personal jurisdiction decision, Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization (2025), left the lower courts to work out what exactly the Fifth Amendment due process analysis entails. The emerging consensus is that those questions can be avoided as long as the facts of a case meet the preexisting test for personal jurisdiction under…
Continue ReadingPersonal Jurisdiction in Federal Antitrust Litigation Post-Fuld: In re Diisocyanates Litigation
Last year, in Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization, the Supreme Court held that the due process limits of personal jurisdiction under the Fifth Amendment differ from those under the Fourteenth. As Maggie Gardner has noted, the Court didn’t say much about what those limits might be—meaning that the lower federal courts will now take on…
Continue ReadingLegislative Control of Personal Jurisdiction—An Opening Door
As every first-year law student learns in Civil Procedure, the Supreme Court constitutionalized the law of personal jurisdiction in Pennoyer v. Neff (1878), holding that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits the jurisdiction that state courts may exercise. Legislatures still have roles to play. States enact long-arm statutes to reach non-resident defendants,…
Continue ReadingSDNY Grapples with Fuld
In Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization, as we have previously covered, the Supreme Court held that the due process limits on personal jurisdiction under the Fifth Amendment differ from those of the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Court did not spell out what the personal jurisdiction analysis should be under the Fifth Amendment, other than stating…
Continue ReadingNew Essay on the Future of Fuld v. PLO
I have expanded on my prior TLB posts on Fuld v. PLO, including a series of posts I wrote last summer critiquing the originalist case for unlimited personal jurisdiction under the Fifth Amendment, in a new essay that is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal Forum and is now available on SSRN. Â In this new…
Continue ReadingThrowback Thursday: Forecasting Fuld
Nearly a decade ago, Professor Aaron Simowitz identified not only the problem presented in Fuld v. PLO (2025), but also the solution the Supreme Court ultimately adopted. This Throwback Thursday post highlights Simowitz’s article Legislating Transnational Jurisdiction (57 Va. J. Int’l L. 325), which offers important insights for those trying to make sense of Fuld’s…
Continue ReadingUnpacking the Originalist Argument for Maximalist Personal Jurisdiction, Part IV: Picquet v. Swan
This is the fourth in a series of posts questioning the originalist argument for unlimited personal jurisdiction in the federal courts. The prior posts have argued that many of the sources cited by proponents of the theory, including early admiralty cases and twentieth-century cases about the extraterritorial reach of Congress’s prescriptive jurisdiction, do not bear…
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