Pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, every litigant is entitled
to due process of law – a fair and equal adjudication of its
dispute. Since 1945 and the United States Supreme Court's
decision in International Shoe, a key component of such
due process and "fair play" is the notion that a
defendant will only be haled into court in a state where the
defendant has had "minimum contacts." Unfortunately, the
fact specific inquiry required to evaluate such contacts has long
been fraught with both theoretical and practical problems –
how significant must such contacts be before it is fair for a
defendant to be sued in a forum?
With the rise of mass tort litigation in the past 50 years,
plaintiffs and their lawyers have at times chosen to take advantage
of this uncertain jurisprudence (and some judges' reluctance to
enforce jurisdictional defenses) to aggregate claims in areas of
the country where counsel believe they may have a strategic
advantage – either because of
