Personal Jurisdiction and Federalism

Personal jurisdiction has long professed to safeguard interstate federalism through the principle that good fences make good neighbors. Although this goal sits uncomfortably with the idea of personal jurisdiction as an individual right under the Due Process Clause, recent decisions from the Supreme Court have reinvigorated the federalism aspect of personal jurisdiction, offering a new opportunity to appraise its value and efficacy. This Article does so and concludes that personal jurisdiction fails to protect interstate federalism. States and private parties, it turns out, have too much authorization to expand state-court personal jurisdiction beyond state borders using the doctrine of consent and to constrict state-court personal jurisdiction within state borders using state law. The resulting distortion of interstate federalism has implications for vertical federalism, too, by creating anomalies in the parallelism between federal-court and state-court personal jurisdiction. I therefore urge the elimination of interstate federalism from personal-jurisdiction doctrine. Doing so not only will refocus personal jurisdiction on its core attention to the relationship between the defendant and the forum but also will shift the responsibility of policing interstate federalism to more apt doctrines of horizontal federalism and court access, such as the Dormant Commerce Clause and the First Amendment's Petition Clause. These recalibrations would produce a simpler, more workable personal-jurisdiction doctrine, for the benefit of courts and parties alike.