Poetlister wrote:And of course the US courts have no power over chapters outside the US
Eh it's more complicated than that.
Basically when you're talking about the jurisdiction of a court, you're talking about subject matter jurisdiction and personal jurisdiction. The former is the power of the court to decide this sort of matter or claim or complaint. The latter is the power of the court to adjudicate the rights of these particular parties.
Importantly, subject-matter jurisdiction isn't exactly tied to geographic location, whether of the parties or the acts/omissions giving rise to the lawsuit. (see below) Subject-matter jurisdiction can't be waived by the parties, even deliberately; the courts are not permitted to adjudicate a claim outside their subject-matter jurisdiction, and if they should happen to do so, the result of that adjudication is subject to collateral attack in another court. A key distinction with subject-matter jurisdiction is that not all parts of a law are "jurisdictional": They may be merely mandatory, which means they're waivable, or even if not waivable, failure to adhere to them may not render a judgment void. So when a law explicitly lays out jurisdictional requirements, those are things you cannot mess around with, period. (this, by the way, is why I'm so militant about the ARBPOL jurisdictional limits. even if it's a Wikipedia policy and has a measure of flexibility built in, words matter, and that exact policy has been used to deny access to ArbCom plenty of times before)
The main exception to this is the requirement under federal diversity jurisdiction, which is how things like state law claims are litigated in federal court. For diversity jurisdiction, there must be full diversity of state citizenship between the parties. So someone in California can't make a federal case out of an auto accident with someone else from California, but might be able to do so with someone from Nevada. There are a variety of other limitations on diversity jurisdiction as well, plus a number of prudential doctrines that would suggest kicking certain claims out of federal court, but that's not really what I'm talking about.
Personal jurisdiction is a bit different. Unlike SMJ, it is waivable, and as a result entering an appearance and arguing any aspect of the case (in some jurisdictions even arguing for dismissal on any grounds other than lack of personal jurisdiction) can make you subject to the jurisdiction of the court. Personal jurisdiction is generally automatic on parties that are residents in the forum (this is different than venue; generally speaking the forum is the state, even for federal court purposes), on people who were physically served in the forum, and on people who waive (even unintentionally) an objection to personal jurisdiction (which includes
all plaintiffs, since filing a complaint involves submitting yourself to the jurisdiction of the court, even for purposes unrelated to the complaint). When dealing with out-of-state defendants it gets
very complex, and I'm going to eschew explaining this in great detail. Suffice it to say that in most cases, personal jurisdiction on an out-of-state defendant will depend on the existence of "minimum contacts" between the defendant and the forum state. As an example, an out-of-state defendant driving a car on the highways in a state, getting in an accident, and then leaving the state will be subject to the jurisdiction of the state where the accident took place.
Generally speaking, in modern practice, if a foreign business is sued it's going to fight the case rather than ignore it, since you
can object to personal jurisdiction and then deal with a loss on those grounds on appeal. Much better to do that than get a default judgment against you and then have to collaterally attack it and hope the court where you do it agrees (this is what you used to have to do). As to jurisdiction and discovery sanctions, I really don't know how those work in practice. I expect the same personal jurisdiction analysis is present in some way, though there may be additional statutory barriers.
“It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.” United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 68, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J. dissenting).
Fontes Apr 26, 2009 5:08 PM (CEST)
