ANSWERS TO
SHORT-ANSWER QUESTIONS

1.   Yes. It is quite clear that a court may constitutionally exercise jurisdiction over anyone who is domiciled in that state. Even though D has temporarily changed his residence to California, his domicile remains Connecticut. This is because one’s domicile is the last place of which it was true both that one resided there and that one had the indefinite intent to remain there. Since D does not intend to remain in California, California cannot be his domicile, so we look at the next prior place he resided, Connecticut. (In fact, Connecticut would still be D’s domicile even if he intended to move to New York after he finished his California job.)

2.  No, probably. According to Worldwide Volkswagen v. Woodson, 444 U.S. 286 (1980), the mere fact that a product finds its way into a state and causes injury there is not enough to subject the out-of-state manufacturer or vendor to personal jurisdiction there. Instead, the defendant must have made some effort to market in the forum state. Here, D was not attempting to market in South Carolina, even though he knew that the doughnuts in question would find their way to South Carolina. Therefore, even though P resides in and is presently located in South Carolina, and all the witnesses are there, it would probably be a violation of due process for the South Carolina courts to subject D to personal jurisdiction there.

4.  No. First, notice that P’s suit requires only specific jurisdiction, not general jurisdiction, over D. That is, P’s claim arises out of the contacts between D and the forum state (the sale, through D’s authorized distributor, of a machine made by D to a New Jersey-based customer, and the consequent in-state injury to P caused by that machine). Next, we need to know what kinds of connections between an out-of-state or foreign manufacturer and the forum state will suffice for specific jurisdiction. The Supreme Court has held that for a state to constitutionally exercise specific jurisdiction over an out-of-state or foreign manufacturer of an item that causes in-state injuries, it is not enough that it was merely foreseeable to the manufacturer that the item would find its way into the forum state and cause injury there. (World-Wide Volkswagen.) Instead, something more of a connection between the manufacturer and the forum state is required. But a majority of the Supreme Court agrees that specific jurisdiction can be constitutionally exercised if the defendant manufacturer “purposefully availed itself” of the opportunity to serve the forum state’s market. (J. McIntyre v. Nicastro.) Here, this “purposeful availment” (or “targeting”) test is satisfied, because D not only urged Distrib to make as many American sales as possible, but approved Distrib’s plan to open a New Jersey office from which, as D knew, Distrib intended to serve the lucrative New Jersey market. That’s enough to constitute a targeting by D of the New Jersey market, making this fact pattern different from the one in McIntyre itself (where specific jurisdiction was found lacking, on the ground that neither the foreign manufacturer nor the American distributor there had targeted the forum state).