Why Daimler Accommodates Personal Jurisdiction in Mass Tort Litigations

Abstract

National and international marketing of defective, toxic or otherwise hazardous products has engendered large-scale mass tort litigations. Unified administration of mass torts in centralized venues serves numerous functional, fairness, efficiency and consistency objectives. Requisite is the forum court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction over the parties. Recently, the Supreme Court has undertaken to reformulate the constitutional parameters of general and specific jurisdiction, in opinions authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Those opinions, culminating in Daimler, self-consciously apply Arthur von Mehren and Donald Trautman’s scholarship set forth in their 1966 Harvard Law Review article “Jurisdiction to Adjudicate.” Neither Daimler nor Justice Ginsburg’s other jurisdictional opinions address mass torts, and Daimler is vulnerable to misinterpretation if applied in the mass tort context without reference to Jurisdiction to Adjudicate and related scholarship. Von Mehren and Trautman endorsed the turn to a functional and fairness approach responsive to the “practical necessities” of the modern litigation scene, and thereby promoted the “unified administration” of multistate actions capable of responding to “the situation as a whole.” Daimler’s theoretical underpinnings demonstrate that the ruling accommodates personal jurisdiction over multistate entities in mass tort litigations.