In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Daimler AG v. Bauman, 134 S. Ct. 746 (2014), holding that the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause prohibits state courts from exercising general jurisdiction over a corporation—i.e., jurisdiction for claims unrelated to its contacts with the state—unless it is “essentially at home” there. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinion in Daimler established a bright-line rule: A corporation is “essentially at home” only where it is incorporated or has its principal place of business, absent “exceptional” circumstances.1 Daimler relegated to the scrap heap New York’s century-old Tauza v. Susquehanna Coal2 test for general jurisdiction: whether the foreign corporation’s contacts with New York were sufficiently continuous and systematic to support a judicial finding that it was “doing business” here.
Over the past three years, plaintiffs’ lawyers have repeatedly attempted an end-run around Daimler, arguing—based on authority tracing back to other Tauza-era cases3—that a foreign corporation registering to do business in a state is deemed to have consented to general jurisdiction there. Trial-level federal and state courts in New York have split on whether this argument comports with the current understanding of Due Process.4 In a 2016 decision involving Connecticut’s registration statute, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit explained that “[i]f mere registration and the accompanying appointment of an in-state agent” sufficed to “confer general jurisdiction by implicit consent, every corporation would be subject to general jurisdiction in every state in which it registered, and Daimler‘s ruling would be robbed of meaning by a back-door thief.” Brown v. Lockheed Martin, 814 F.3d 619, 640 (2d Cir. 2016).
