Abstract

The Declaration of Independence accuses King George III of having "obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers." But despite the seemingly natural resonance of this particular charge with the legal profession, legal scholars have given remarkably little attention to the controversy that provoked this particular complaint. This Article traces the colonists' complaint to a somewhat surprising and unexpected source—a dispute about personal jurisdiction.

During the late eighteenth century, administrative officials responsible for overseeing Britain's North American possessions sought to eliminate the use of the custom of foreign attachment by colonial court systems. This device, which had proliferated throughout the colonies, provided a mechanism by which local courts could exercise jurisdiction over suits against non-resident defendants by attaching the defendants' property within the colony. The elected representatives of the colony of North Carolina pushed back against the Crown's efforts to deprive them of their privilege of foreign attachment by refusing the governor's insistence that a provision authorizing the procedure be stricken from a bill renewing authorization for the colony's court system. The resulting impasse effectively terminated judicial authority in North Carolina and left the residents of the colony without a fully functioning court system for more than three years. The Declaration of Independence, drafted amidst the North Carolinians' showdown over foreign attachment, incorporated their complaint as one of the twenty-eight charges of royal abuse that the colonists claimed justified their separation and independence.

Two recent trends in the Supreme Court's personal jurisdiction doctrine may render the Revolutionary-era showdown over the territorial reach of North Carolina's courts newly relevant to assessing the permissible scope of state-court jurisdiction. First, in a series of decisions stretching back to the early 2010s, the Supreme Court has limited the reach of state jurisdiction to levels not seen since the early portion of the twentieth century. Second, over the same period, at least some Justices have expressed reservations about the current state of the Court's doctrine and a potential openness to steering personal jurisdiction in a more originalist-oriented direction. Against this backdrop, the North Carolinians' struggle to determine for themselves the jurisdictional reach of their local courts may hold important lessons for the proper understanding of state sovereignty and its connection to the constitutional standards governing state court jurisdiction.

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