Applying the At-Home Test

Applying the At-Home Test

A general-jurisdiction problem yields to a fixed sequence of questions, and the sequence follows from what Daimler AG v. Bauman decided. For a corporation, the inquiry asks whether its affiliations with the forum state are so continuous and systematic as to render it essentially at home there, and the paradigm homes are its place of incorporation and its principal place of business.¹ BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell, a case about a domestic railroad, restated the rule: absent exceptional circumstances, a corporation is not subject to general jurisdiction in a state merely because it does substantial business there.² Because the test is demanding, a problem should reach it only when nothing else will do. The first question therefore concerns the claim, and the question about the defendant's home comes second.

The sorting question asks whether the plaintiff's claim arises out of or relates to the defendant's voluntary contacts with the forum state.³ A yes sends the case to specific jurisdiction. The claim itself then justifies the forum, minimum contacts suffice, and no one has to locate the defendant's home. A no leaves the defendant's own relationship with the state to carry the whole case, so general jurisdiction is the only route and the demanding test applies.⁴ Skipping the sorting step invites two errors. One forces a claim that grew out of the forum into the at-home test, where a small contact looks too small. The other counts forum contacts toward general jurisdiction when the claim has no link to them, which revives the doing-business view that Daimler replaced. This section does not work through the specific-jurisdiction analysis itself; the sorting question only sends the problem down one track or the other.

An exam stem that looks generous to the plaintiff shows the sequence at work. Penelope buys a space heater at a Florida store of Bargain Barn, a chain incorporated in Delaware with its principal place of business in Tennessee. The heater burns her at home in Georgia, and she sues Bargain Barn in a Georgia court, where the chain operates seventy-five stores. The claim arises from a Florida sale, so it does not arise from the Georgia stores, and the case needs general jurisdiction. Georgia is neither the chain's state of incorporation nor its principal place of business. Dozens of stores in a state do not make a retailer at home there, and nothing about seventy-five stores presents an exceptional circumstance.⁵ The Georgia court therefore lacks personal jurisdiction. The identical suit filed in Tennessee comes out the other way, because a company is typically at home in the state of its principal place of business, and a court there may hear any claim against it, including one about a Florida sale.⁶ The claim, the plaintiff, and the Georgia stores stayed fixed across the two suits, and the forum alone changed the result.

The next questions identify the defendant and locate its home. An individual is at home where the individual is domiciled, so the question is whether the defendant was domiciled in the forum state at the time of service. The Court's modern corporate cases suggest, without squarely holding, that due process confines general jurisdiction over an individual, absent consent, to the person's home state.⁷ Service on a defendant who is physically present in the state is a separate basis for jurisdiction, and it works even when the suit has nothing to do with the defendant's forum contacts.⁸ Consent and waiver are separate bases as well.⁹ All of these belong to other readings, and this method stops at domicile. For a corporation, the questions are whether the forum is its state of incorporation and whether it is the state of its principal place of business. A yes to either settles the problem, because each is a paradigm home. The two can point to different states, and the corporation is then at home in both. A no to both leaves the corporation outside the forum's general jurisdiction unless the facts are exceptional.¹⁰

The same defendant can fall on one side of the sorting question for one plaintiff and on the other side for the next. Pack-More is a citizen of North Dakota, and its New York sales amount to less than four percent of its total revenues.¹¹ An employee of the Town of Oyster Bay fell from a loading device that Pack-More sold to the Town after the Town Engineer saw an advertisement in a New York trade magazine, and he sued Pack-More in New York.¹² His claim at least relates to Pack-More's New York-directed contacts, the advertising and the sale to a New York town. The sorting question therefore sends his case to specific jurisdiction, and Pack-More's home never has to be found. Whether those contacts suffice, given that the Town's workers took title in Illinois, is a specific-jurisdiction question this section leaves open. The same New York sales do nothing for a plaintiff whose claim lies elsewhere.

The fifth question asks which entity is actually being sued. A corporation and its subsidiary are separate defendants, and the at-home test is put to each one separately. In Daimler the Court assumed that the subsidiary was at home in California and that its contacts were attributable to the foreign parent. It still found no general jurisdiction over the parent, because the parent's own slim contacts with California hardly rendered it at home there.¹⁴ Attribution is therefore never the end of the analysis, and a subsidiary's forum contacts cannot by themselves make the parent at home.

Two features of the end of the analysis save time. The exceptional case matters only after the paradigm forums have failed, and it requires facts like those in Perkins. There, war had devastated the company's properties in the Philippines, where its principal place of business lay, and its president directed the company's rehabilitation from an Ohio office. Given those exceptional circumstances, Ohio had general jurisdiction even though the company's principal place of business and state of incorporation were elsewhere.¹⁶ Many stores, a large payroll, or a long rail network in a forum describe doing business, and they do not turn the forum into the center of the enterprise. Once a defendant is found at home, the analysis also ends. The multi-factor reasonableness check belongs to specific jurisdiction, and any second-step inquiry would be superfluous for a corporation that is genuinely at home in the forum.¹⁷ An argument that defending in the home forum is inconvenient therefore changes nothing at this stage.

The narrowing matters most in two kinds of problems. The first pairs a foreign defendant with foreign events. A French automaker, incorporated and headquartered in France, makes a car that swerves and injures an American tourist in Italy, and the tourist sues in Texas. No matter how much business the automaker does in Texas or in the United States, Texas is not its home, and the suit does not arise out of any Texas activity.¹⁸ The suit fails in Texas unless some basis outside this method, such as consent, supplies jurisdiction. The second problem pairs a national chain with a state that is not its home. The chain's stores there may support specific jurisdiction over claims that grow out of them, but on unrelated claims the chain ordinarily answers only in its paradigm homes. Large companies are now subject to general jurisdiction in fewer states than when the test was continuous and systematic contacts, and a plaintiff injured elsewhere has fewer forums than the old doing-business test provided.¹⁹

No sixth step weighs fairness, since a defendant found at home under step 3 or step 4 has no reasonableness inquiry left to run. A defendant that fails every step cannot be sued in that forum on an unrelated claim, however large its operations there, and the answer then turns to whether the claim fits specific jurisdiction.