A Corrected View on Personal Jurisdiction

On the first day of August I wrote about the issue of personal jurisdiction in contracts. Since then I've been able to reach my publishing lawyer and discuss the issue with him, as I was vaguely unsatisfied with what I had read. He gave me a more accurate view. The issue of personal jurisdiction is not that unusual, in the sense that parties to a contract are generally subject to the jurisdiction of where they take place. Things used to get a little odd in the early days of the country. If you had done business with someone in another state - even if the border were only a few miles away - you generally couldn't even serve them with papers unless you could catch them in your state.

That's has gone to the wayside, and generally if you sign a contract with another party in a second state, either of you can potentially be subject to the jurisdiction of either state when it comes to a law suit. That's why I have generally suggested to be wary of clauses that restrict jurisdiction of the city or county where your client resides, because you may not want to travel to protect your contractual rights.

The lawyer said that the concept of personal jurisdiction was generally tied in to specifying the area in which action would have to take place - back to that concept of giving the other party automatic jurisdiction. And if that had been the case, the phrase probably wouldn't have caught my eye so much. However, it was personal jurisdiction untied to any location.

The lawyer said that was largely gobbledygook, because without the location, it had no significant meaning. So if you see the phrase sitting along, not tied to a specific place - like personal jurisdiction in Nevada - then chances are you don't have anything to worry about from it. Sorry about any misunderstanding I've caused - the issue of contracts is one where you can never get so "experienced" that you can't learn even more, and the more you learn, the better off you are.