Personal Jurisdiction: Long Arm Jurisdiction Over a Non-resident Defendant

A. There must be a long-arm statute which authorizes a state’s courts to exercise jurisdiction under the circumstances. The state can, but need not, exercise jurisdiction to the full extent permitted by the Due Process Clause.

B. The exercise of personal jurisdiction must comport with the requirements of the Due Process Clause.

1.  General Jurisdiction

a.  The defendant’s activities in the forum are substantial or continuous and systematic.
b.  The cause of action need not arise from the forum contacts.

2.  Specific Jurisdiction

a.  The defendant must have minimum contacts with the forum and
b.  The claim must arise out of those contacts and
c.  The exercise of jurisdiction must be reasonable. 

(i) Minimum contacts can be established by a number of factors:

a.  Purposeful availment - whether the defendant has purposefully availed himself of the benefits of doing business in the forum
b.  Targeting the forum state (through advertisements, website content or other activities) (sometimes referred to as express aiming)
c.  The Zippo sliding scale - when based on online contacts, some courts examine the nature of the defendant’s website and evaluate its degree of interactivity (this test is considered by some courts to be more useful when the claim is contractual in nature rather than an intentional tort)

(ii) Long arm jurisdiction when claim is an intentional tort:

a.  general jurisdiction over the nonresident defendant or
b.  the nonresident defendant committed a tort within the forum or
c.  the nonresident defendant committed a tort outside the forum that he knew or had reason to know would produce harm within the forum state (the effects test from Caldor v. Jones) - intentional actions expressly aimed (referred to as the express aiming test) at the forum causing harm the brunt of which is suffered and defendant knows will be suffered in the forum
d. when the tort is committed by creating content on a website, such as defamation, some courts examine the general content of the website in general rather than the defamatory content alone and require that the website be targeted at forum readers
e. some courts require more than the commission of a tort outside the forum by a defendant who knew or had reason to know would produce harm within the forum state, but in addition require that the forum be the focal point of the tort