The Supreme Court recently declined to review the Seventh Circuit’s ruling in
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of California, 582 US (2017) did not apply to class actions and therefore that a federal court in Illinois somehow had specific personal jurisdiction over the individual claims of unnamed class members who had no connection whatsoever to that forum state.
In
Bristol-Myers, the Supreme Court held that federal courts do not have specific personal jurisdiction over the nonresidents’ claims merely because resident plaintiffs “allegedly sustained the same injuries as did the nonresidents.” The defendant in
Mussat argued that the holding in
Bristol-Myers (a mass action) should apply with equal force to its case (a class action). As our regular readers know, this argument makes abundant sense but has seen varying levels of success. In