Residence Venue

Residence Venue

Section 1391(b)(1), the first of the statute's venue alternatives, ties venue to the place where the defendants live. It permits a civil action in "a judicial district in which any defendant resides, if all defendants are residents of the State in which the district is located."¹ The sentence sets two conditions, and a plaintiff must meet both. First, some defendant must reside in the particular district where the plaintiff filed. Second, every defendant must reside in the state where that district lies. Once the first condition is met, a lone defendant satisfies the second automatically, because a defendant who resides in the district resides in the state where it lies. A single-defendant case therefore turns on the first condition.² The statutory definition of "resides," and the way the second condition works when there are several defendants, come in later sections.

Subsection (1) rests on an assumption about the defendants' burden. A defendant will not be greatly inconvenienced by defending in a federal court located in a state where all the defendants reside, and that court has an interest in resolving a dispute involving a defendant from its own state.³ The assumption looks only at the defendants. Where the plaintiff lives and where the events occurred never enter the comparison.

The unit of comparison is the district, not the state. A defendant who is subject to personal jurisdiction anywhere in a state does not become a resident of every district in it. Personal jurisdiction may reach statewide, but residence venue reaches only the district where the defendant lives.⁴ The statute uses both units, each for its own job. The district marks the place of trial, and the state tests whether the defendants share a home. Treating statewide personal jurisdiction as statewide venue is the mistake to avoid.

Only the district changed between the two filings. The plaintiff, the defendant, and the state stayed the same. Powers could also sue in the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan, under the events alternative taken up below. The Northern and Southern Districts are then both proper, and the Western District is not.⁵

The second condition looks at the whole group of defendants, and one defendant from another state can spoil residence venue for the rest.⁶ In one appeal, the court observed that venue would have been proper under § 1391(b)(1) and (c) without one defendant, DePew, because the remaining defendants resided in Iowa. It knew of no rule requiring a district court to dismiss a defendant on its own to preserve venue, and the plaintiff, Woodke, had never moved to dismiss him.⁷ The choice to drop the outlier belongs to the plaintiff.

Courts apply the same two-part filter to individual defendants. The complaint in one Alabama federal case alleged that the defendant, Reeves, was a citizen of Florida with his domicile there. Section 1391(c)(1) places an individual's residence in the district where that person is domiciled. Reeves therefore did not reside in Alabama, and subsection (1) did not support venue there.⁸ In another case the plaintiff sued in Michigan a defendant, Ary, who lived in Texas. Ary's residence gave Michigan no claim under subsection (1). The court said that venue under that subsection would most likely lie in the Southern District of Texas, where Ary resides. It then turned to subsection (2), because subsection (3) applies only if no district would otherwise do.⁹ In both cases the chosen forum sat in a state where the defendant did not live. The Buffalo filing sits in the defendant's own state and still fails, which is why the district must be checked separately from the state.

The third step separates residence venue from the other alternatives. Powers's Connecticut home has no bearing on whether Albany works, and neither does the Manhattan accident, because an action may be brought in the defendant's home district even when everything that happened took place elsewhere.¹⁰ Each alternative stands on its own, so one case may have several proper districts at once. Here Albany is proper by residence and Manhattan by events.¹¹