Letters Blogatory

The Blog of International Judicial Assistance | By Ted Folkman of Folkman LLC

Posts tagged “personal jurisdiction”

Case of the Day: Ford v. Montana

Posted on March 26, 2021

The case of the day is Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court (S. Ct. 2021). It’s an personal jurisdiction decision that keeps the law from going off the rails but also may be important in its future implications. The case involved a car accident that took place in one US state, the state where the injured plaintiff lived. Ford didn’t manufacture or design the car in that state, but it did advertise, sell, and service the car model that was involved in the accident there. Ford claimed that the state court lacked personal jurisdiction because it hadn’t manufactured or designed the particular car in question in that state, but the court rejected its argument: “When a company like Ford serves a…

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Ingrid Wuerth on Personal Jurisdiction and the Fifth Amendment Due Process Rights of Foreign Sovereigns and State-Owned Enterprises

Posted on July 29, 2019

Ingrid Wuerth, Professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School and friend of Letters Blogatory (you can follow her at @WuerthIngrid on Twitter), has an important new forthcoming paper on foreign states’ status as “persons” under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. I’m very happy that she’s previewing her paper here at Letters Blogatory. The basic claim is that foreign states should be treated as persons under the Fifth Amendment, and that even if the FSIA purports to give the courts personal jurisdiction in any FSIA case in which an exception to immunity does not apply, the courts must still do a constitutional analysis. There are some claims, she writes, where a foreign state probably is not subject to personal jurisdiction, e.g., terrorism…

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Case of the Day: Nike v. Wu

Posted on November 23, 2018

The case of the day is Nike, Inc. v. Wu (S.D.N.Y. 2018). Nike and Converse, the shoe companies, brought trademark infringement cases against hundreds of online retailers. These actions resulted in a default judgment for $1.8 billion, which perhaps will not turn out to be worth the paper it was printed on. The companies assigned their judgment to Next Investments, LLC. Next Investments caused subpoenas to be issued to Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, Bank of Communications, China Construction Bank, China Merchants Bank, and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, seeking information on the judgment debtors’ assets. It’s not clear from the decision how the subpoenas were served, but presumably they were served on the New York branch offices of the Chinese…

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