SCOTUS OT16 Symposium: Bristol-Meyers Squibb and More Work for Lawyers

Following up on Howard’s and Stephen’s posts about Bristol-Myers, I think the best thing that can be said about the case is that it creates work for more lawyers in more cases.

It’s not so great, on the other hand, for plaintiffs--or for judicial efficiency.  The Court tells us that class actions plaintiffs will have two options. They can sue in the defendant’s home state--which may work well in a single-defendant case, but will be problematic in a multi-defendant case and especially problematic when the defendant is a foreign corporation. Or the plaintiffs residing in a single state can file a class action where the plaintiffs live and/or suffered harm. The economics of class actions might make this difficult for plaintiffs. I would think that it would also make it difficult for defendants, who would presumably not want to face 50 separate class actions. However, at least the bloggers at the Drug and Device Law Blog don’t seem to be too worried about that, but instead conclude that the case made for “[a] very good day for the right side of the “v.” – and not very good for those on the wrong side.”

MDL practice may also provide another possibility for consolidating litigation nationwide. But the Court left open the same question that Stephen Sachs pointed out was not decided in BNSF—“whether the Fifth Amendment imposes the same restrictions on the exercise of personal jurisdiction by a federal court.” I suspect this question will be the topic of a great deal of litigation in the near future.

This case also didn't raise the question of whether states can require that companies registering to do business consent to jurisdiction in their courts. I think this question will also continue to be litigated, and I think it depends on what is most important to the Court. Is it the effect (narrowing jurisdiction)? If so, then perhaps such a requirement would be struck down.  But the Court also gave significant lip service to the concepts of state sovereignty and respect for territorial boundaries—which might suggest that, as a matter of federalism, states should be allowed to be make such a requirement—at least in those cases where there is a clear state interest in hearing the case.

As Professor Rocky Rhodes and I discuss in a recent piece, the Court’s focus on a narrow conception of jurisdiction makes the problem of jurisdictional discovery much more salient. Unfortunately, however, the recent amendments to the discovery rules make the jurisdictional discovery process harder. But the more the Court narrows the grounds for jurisdiction, the more important such jurisdictional discovery will become.

And finally, a note in response to Stephen’s point about “what's ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ about jurisdiction is whether a particular government is fairly empowered to decide the case.” I would offer a friendly amendment to substitute “claim” for “case.” I think it matters in this context.  I would have preferred to think in terms of “cases,” which I think gets to the question about the court’s power of the defendant in general—can this court hale this defendant before it?  But the Court’s opinion today offered a narrowed conception, focusing on individual claims rather than cases. Can this court hale this defendant before it as to this particular claim by this particular plaintiff? This narrower view seems to move away from what I see as the importance of personal jurisdiction (haling an unwilling defendant into court at all), and moves toward something that looks more like venue—except with a constitutional dimension. I suspect that this means the Court will not be particularly sympathetic to the idea of pendent personal jurisdiction. But the question, like so many others left open, will still need to be litigated.