On Jan. 14, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Daimler AG v. Bauman, 571 U.S. __ (2014) (slip op.), an extraordinarily important opinion with respect to general personal jurisdiction over corporations, particularly foreign corporations. In an eight-justice opinion (with Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurring separately in the result), the court held that general jurisdiction may only exist over a corporation when “that corporation’s ‘affiliations with the State are so ‘continuous and systematic’ as to render [it] essentially at home in the forum State.’”1 This decision effectively invalidates 47 years of general jurisdiction law in the state of New York starting with the seminal New York Court of Appeals case, Frummer v. Hilton Hotels Int’l, 19 N.Y.2d 533, 227 N.E.2d 851, 281 N.Y.S.2d 41 (1967), and it severely restricts the ability of a plaintiff to hail a foreign corporation into New York court based on a theory of general jurisdiction.

General Personal Jurisdiction

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause “protects an individual’s liberty interest in not being subject to the binding judgments of a forum with which he has established no meaningful ‘contacts, ties, or relations.’”2 The Supreme Court’s decision in International Shoe v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310 (1945), sets forth the due process requirements for personal jurisdiction over a corporation.3 According to the court, “[due process] demands may be met by such contacts of the corporation with the state of the forum as make it reasonable…to require the corporation to defend the particular suit which is brought there.”4

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