The Unsettled State of Corporate General Personal Jurisdiction

In the 2023 case of Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Company, a sharply divided United States Supreme Court held that general-jurisdiction-by-registration statutes do not violate the Due Process Clause. The Court based its decision on the 1917 case of Pennsylvania Fire Ins. Co. of Philadelphia v. Gold Issue Mining & Milling Co., which upheld Missouri’s registration-jurisdiction statute against a due process challenge. The plurality and concurring opinions in Mallory viewed Pennsylvania Fire as a controlling precedent that dictated a ruling in favor of Pennsylvania’s registration-jurisdiction statute. Ironically, however, Mallory’s affirmation of Pennsylvania Fire implicitly repudiated a recent line of general jurisdiction cases known as the Goodyear trilogy. The Goodyear cases narrowed the scope of general jurisdiction for corporations, thus clarifying the law after decades of circuit splits and inconsistent rulings. By gutting the practical effectiveness of the Goodyear trilogy, Mallory threatens to set off a jurisdictional free-for-all in corporate litigation.This Article examines Mallory’s unsettling ramifications for corporate general personal jurisdiction. It proceeds in four parts. Part I explains the rationale behind the Court’s ruling. Part II examines the judicial uncertainty and inconsistent rulings that plagued corporate general personal jurisdiction before Goodyear. Part III argues that the Goodyear trilogy brought long overdue stability, consistency, and predictability to corporate general jurisdiction. When combined with the Court’s recent clarification of specific jurisdiction’s scope, Goodyear and its companion cases placed plaintiffs and defendants on a level playing field. But the Mallory decision destroys that equilibrium and creates a new era of instability in corporate general jurisdiction. Part IV warns of the consequences if the Court fails to salvage at least some of the stability achieved by the Goodyear trilogy. As Justice Alito noted in his concurring opinion in Mallory, there is a strong case to be made that general-jurisdiction-by-registration statutes violate the Dormant Commerce Clause. At present, however, Mallory clears the way for legislatures to coerce foreign corporations to consent to all-purpose jurisdiction without running afoul of the Due Process Clause. Left unchecked, the ruling will give rise to a patchwork quilt of conflicting general jurisdiction rules and questionable choice-of-law determinations. Mallory may thus go down in history as the case that turned the clock back to the unsettled pre-Goodyear era of corporate general jurisdiction.