Is Personal Jurisdiction Constitutionally Self-Enacting?

A. Benjamin Spencer, The Territorial Reach of Federal Courts, __ Fla. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at SSRN. Lumen N. Mulligan Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(k) generally limits the scope of a federal district court’s personal jurisdiction to that of the state in which it sits. We have this paralleling of state- and federal-court personal jurisdiction despite the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment limits only the states’ exercise of personal jurisdiction while it is the Fifth Amendment that presumptively regulates the federal exercise of that same power. Building upon this distinction, Benjamin Spencer, in his dual role as a preeminent procedural scholar and member of the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rules, argues that we should decouple federal and state court personal jurisdiction doctrine. You should give this short, but thought-provoking, essay a read not only because Spencer is one of the top proceduralists writing…

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