A federal judge has split from a growing line of recent federal and state rulings that have held that registering to do business in Pennsylvania still means consenting to be sued in Pennsylvania, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's seemingly conflicting 2014 ruling in Daimler AG v. Bauman.

On June 6, U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania granted a motion to dismiss filed by defendant Huntington Ingalls in In re Asbestos Products Liability Litigation (No. VI). In doing so, Robreno ruled that, in the wake of Daimler, Pennsylvania's consent by registration statutory scheme violates the due process clause.

The Daimler court ruled that jurisdiction could not be exercised over a corporation in a state where that corporation was not “at home,” which the justices defined as having “continuous and systematic” “affiliations” with the state where the litigation was filed.

But several federal district courts in Pennsylvania, as well as the state Superior Court, have upheld consent by registration post-Daimler.

Last year, in a pair of precedential decisions—Webb-Benjamin v. International Rug Group from June 28 and Murray v. American LaFrance from Sept. 25—two different three-judge panels of the Superior Court ruled that Daimler had no impact on the consent provision in Pennsylvania's long-arm statute and that registering to do business in the state still means agreeing to the possibility of being sued in the state. Both rulings relied heavily on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania's 2016 decision in Bors v. Johnson & Johnson. (The Superior Court en banc has agreed to reconsider Murray, however, so the issue remains in flux in state court as well.)

Robreno acknowledged those cases in a footnote, but said that “while the explicit Pa. statutory scheme may indicate that consent to jurisdiction is knowing, it does not make it voluntary.”

“Thus, this court departs from these holdings as the consent extracted is invalid,” Robreno said. ”Contrary to these courts' view, the issue was never whether Daimler invalidated consent to personal jurisdiction, but whether a scheme that forces consent can be found valid after Daimler.”

Robreno said it cannot.

“The Pa. statutory scheme presents a foreign corporation with a Hobson's choice: consent to general personal jurisdiction or be denied the benefits of doing business in Pennsylvania,” he said. “To put it another way, the Pa. statutory scheme conditions the benefit of certain privileges of doing business in Pennsylvania upon the surrender of the constitutional right, recognized in Daimler, to be subject to general personal jurisdiction only where the corporation is 'at home.'”

Pennsylvania “impermissibly re-opens the door to nation-wide general jurisdiction that Daimler firmly closed,” Robreno said.

Robreno then turned to the question of whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit's 1991 ruling in Bane v. Netlink, which upheld consent by registration, was invalidated by Daimler.

While recognizing that district courts are bound by circuit court precedent, Robreno pointed to the Third Circuit's 1991 ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, which held that when a constitutional standard recognized by a circuit is replaced by newer Supreme Court law, the circuit's previous standard is no longer binding on lower courts.

“The rule that emerges from Daimler changed the standard for determining when a state may exercise general personal jurisdiction over a foreign corporation,” Robreno said. ”Therefore, applying Casey to the facts of this case, the result obtained under Bane (general personal jurisdiction over a foreign corporation by statutory consent) cannot stand under the new constitutional standard adopted in Daimler (general personal jurisdiction only where the foreign corporation is at home). Thus, this court is bound to apply the new Daimler standard not withstanding previous circuit law.”

Counsel for the plaintiffs, Robert Paul of Paul, Reich & Myers in Philadelphia, could not be reached for comment.

Counsel for Huntington Ingalls, Thomas Waskom at Hunton Andrews Kurth in Richmond, Virginia, said he was not authorized to comment on the ruling.