Zachary D. Clopton (Northwestern University - Northwestern Pritzker School of Law) has posted Long Arm 'Statutes' (23 Green Bag 2d 89 (2020)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Long arm statutes, we have been told, are the vehicles through which legislatures define the personal jurisdiction of their courts. But it turns out that many long arm “statutes” are not statutes at all. Although most states define personal jurisdiction in statutes, twelve states put their long arms in judge-made rules or in a combination of rules and statutes.
In search of a better label – and a deeper understanding – I attempted to determine which “long arm statutes” are statutes and which are something else. I asked this question based on current law, as well as based on the law of each state when that state adopted its first set of judge-made rules of procedure. This short essay presents those results and offers some thoughts on what these findings have to say about federal procedure and about the institutional design of procedure-making in American law. It also provides an appendix documenting various aspects of state long arms.
