10-76 Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S.A., v. Brown

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Civil Procedure
Personal jurisdiction; foreign corporations

A state lacks personal jurisdiction over a foreign corporation that is not registered to do business in the state, has no place of business, employees, or bank accounts, and does not design, manufacture, or advertise their products in the state.

Petitioners lack “the kind of continuous and systematic general business contacts” necessary to allow North Carolina to entertain a suit against them unrelated to anything that connects them to the State. Helicopteros, 466 U. S., at 416. The stream-of-commerce cases on which the North Carolina court relied relate to exercises of specific jurisdiction in products liability actions, in which a nonresident defendant, acting outside the forum, places in the stream of commerce a product that ultimately causes harm inside the forum. Many state long-arm statutes authorize courts to exercise specific jurisdiction over manufacturers when the events in suit, or some of them, occurred within the forum State. The North Carolina court’s stream-of-commerce analysis elided the essential difference between case-specific and general jurisdiction. Flow of a manufacturer’s products into the forum may bolster an affiliation germane to specific jurisdiction, see, e.g., World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson, 444 U. S. 286, 297; but ties serving to bolster the exercise of specific jurisdiction do not warrant a determination that, based on those ties, the forum has general jurisdiction over a defendant. A corporation’s “continuous activity of some sorts within a state,” International Shoe instructed, “is not enough to support the demand that the corporation be amenable to suits unrelated to that activity.”

681 S. E. 2d 382, reversed.

10-76 Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S.A., v. Brown

Ginsburg, J.

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