The Not-So-Odd Couple: Specific Personal Jurisdiction and Party Joinder

Abstract

Traditionally, scholars and courts alike have thought of joinder of parties and personal jurisdiction as separate questions. Party-joinder determined “who” should be in the lawsuit, whereas personal jurisdiction determined “what” power courts could exercise over parties to the lawsuit—a question that invariably became more complicated the more parties involved. The Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court forced a reckoning between these two areas of civil procedure law. In that case, the Court irreversibly connected specific personal jurisdiction and party-joinder by holding that non-California plaintiffs could not be part of a California lawsuit because their claims did not share a connection with the defendant’s forum contacts and that California courts thus lacked specific jurisdiction over the defendant. The Bristol-Myers Squibb ruling, it appeared, could affect party-joinder in two ways: (1) aggregation of plaintiffs would be less available than before because specific personal jurisdiction would now bar joinder; or (2) aggregation of plaintiffs would be unaffected because it’s always been true that personal jurisdiction could bar joinder. This Article articulates a third, hybrid option, concluding that any diminishing effect on joinder after Bristol-Myers Squibb is not the result of any changes to specific personal jurisdiction or party-joinder doctrines, but instead is the natural and practical consequence of defendants no longer waiving personal jurisdiction challenges. This Article analyzes both the relevant Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and key Supreme Court decisions on both party-joinder and specific personal jurisdiction and identifies a longstanding connection between the two doctrines that Bristol-Myers Squibb merely clarified: the requirement that a lawsuit must arise out of or relate to the defendant’s contacts with the forum, means that each plaintiff’s lawsuit must share a connection with the defendant’s forum contacts. It also analyzes both the perceived and actual effect of Bristol-Myers Squibb on plaintiff-joinder and concludes that (1) Bristol-Myers Squibb has not had any discernable effect on plaintiff-aggregation in traditional, non-class cases; and (2) any decrease in aggregation in recent years was merely a result of increased personal jurisdiction objections by defendants after Bristol-Myers Squibb highlighted the connection between jurisdiction and party-joinder.