Virginia has jurisdiction over Twitter in Nunes suit

It must be awful procedure day. In addition to whatever the Second Circuit did, a Virginia trial court denied Twitter's motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction Cong. Nunes' suit against Twitter, a Twitter user, and Devin Nunes' Cow.

The court found "general personal jurisdiction" over Twitter, based on its being registered to do business in Virginia, having a registered agent in Virginia, deriving a large amount of revenue from there, and having many users in Virginia, "sufficient minimum contacts to confer jurisdiction." Perhaps in 2005, but not since Good Year, Daimler, and BNSF did away with general jurisdiction based on a company doing a lot of business in a state and seemed to limit general jurisdiction to state of incorporation and principal place of business. The court discussed BNSF to distinguish it based on the injury occurring in the forum state, but ignored the other two cases. It also emphasized that Nunes suffered an injury in Virginia (because that is where the tweets were sent from and read), while not mentioning that locus of injury is not sufficient and Twitter did not direct any activities (not deleting the tweets) at Virginia in relation to this case. Even if knowledge of the plaintiff's location were sufficient (it is not, after Walden), Twitter's assumption would have been that Nunes was in California or Washington, D.C., not Virginia.

The court also rejected a forum non conveniens argument, because it was not clear there was an alternative forum. It was not clear there would be jurisdiction in California, even though both Nunes and Twitter are from there and the individual defendant consented to jurisdiction there. (Nunes does not want to be in California, where he must deal with its SLAPP statute).

Someone said the judge has a reputation as being pretty good. This is not his best work.