Personal Jurisdiction : an Architectural Problem ?

Late twentieth-century jurisprudence on personal jurisdiction has had to deal with a fundamental challenge to conventional interpretations of both territorial sovereignty and networks or contacts, different than those that arose from traditional re-interpretations of visualized, cartographic space or corporate activity. Globalization makes border crossing a little bit too easy, and thereby calls into question the model of sovereign territorial integrity, and the internet invented a spatial apparatus that bypasses the territorial nation–state completely. It can seem the fundamental question motivating the jurisprudence surrounding personal jurisdiction has become how to balance respect for bodily spaces against respect for territorial spaces and corporate spaces. This Essay argues that this spatial narrative has too easily set aside the linguistic quality of personal jurisdiction. The act of speaking the law operated at the heart of medieval jurisprudence, and that linguistic quality of personal jurisdiction has, if anything, become more apparent in the age of widespread digital computation. This Essay makes the case that personal jurisdiction is, and has historically been, more computational and architectural than spatial. Jurisdiction broadly defined has never lost its spoken, rather than visual, character. This Essay situates International Shoe, Nicastro, Daimler AG v. Bauman, and Walden v. Fiore within an alternative history of jurisdictional architecture. Each rests squarely on the idea that neither space nor network-contact is as relevant to jurisdiction as architectural process and algorithmic function, resulting in a remarkable continuity of personal jurisdiction doctrine in the United States.