Aaron R. Petty (U.S. Department of Justice) has posted Personal Jurisdiction as a Mandatory Rule on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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For the past decade, the Supreme Court has consistently admonished the bench and bar that rules delineating the scope of federal jurisdiction must not be confused with emphatic, but non-jurisdictional, bars to judicial review. Whether a particular rule falls on one side of the jurisdictional divide or the other has presented a difficult question. In a recent article, Scott Dodson proposes that there are a class of rules —“mandatory rules”— that while not jurisdictional in the strict sense now employed by the Supreme Court, nonetheless possess some jurisdictional characteristics. In this Essay, I suggest that personal jurisdiction is one such mandatory rule. That is, I suggest that under the logic now employed by the Supreme Court, personal jurisdiction is not “jurisdiction” at all. Limiting the jurisdictional label to subject-matter jurisdiction will facilitate terminological and conceptual clarity in what has become a confused field.
Recommended. For Dodson's theory, see Mandatory Rules.
