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103 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1 (2025-2026)

handle is hein.journals/walq103 and id is 1 raw text is: PERSONAL JURISDICTION AND FEDERALISM SCOTT DODSON* ABSTRACT Personal jurisdiction has long professed to safeguard interstate federalism through the principle that good fences make good neighbors. Although this goal sits uncomfortably with the idea ofpersonal jurisdiction as an individual right under the Due Process Clause, recent decisions from the Supreme Court have reinvigorated the federalism aspect of personal jurisdiction, offering a new opportunity to appraise its value and efficacy. This Article does so and concludes that personal jurisdiction fails to protect interstate federalism. States and private parties, it turns out, have too much authorization to expand state-court personal jurisdiction beyond state borders using the doctrine of consent and to constrict state-court personal jurisdiction within state borders using state law. The resulting distortion of interstate federalism has implications for vertical federalism, too, by creating anomalies in the parallelism betweenfederal-court and state-court personal jurisdiction. I therefore urge the elimination of interstate federalism from personal-jurisdiction doctrine. Doing so not only will refocus personal jurisdiction on its core attention to the relationship between the defendant and the forum but also will shift the responsibility of policing interstate federalism to more apt doctrines ofhorizontalfederalism and court access, such as the Dormant Commerce Clause and the First Amendment's Petition Clause. These recalibrations would produce a simpler, more workable personal-jurisdiction doctrine, for the benefit of courts and parties alike. * James Edgar Hervey Chair in Litigation, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Litigation and Courts, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. This paper was selected for presentation at the Tenth Annual Civil Procedure Workshop, and I am grateful for the feedback it received there. Thanks also to those who commented on an early draft presented at the UC Law SF Works-in-Progress Workshop, especially Jon Abel, Hadar Aviram, Zac Henderson, and Dave Owen. 1