Jurisdiction Over Corporate Officers and the Incoherence of Implied Consent
Verity Winship | 2013 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1171
Corporate officers of most large corporations in the United States have little contact with the state of incorporation—usually Delaware—beyond the bare fact of being a corporate officer. Ju-risdiction in that state’s courts thus depends on whether the position alone provides constitution-ally significant minimum contacts with the state. This Article argues that statutorily implied con-sent is an incoherent basis for personal juris-diction over corporate officers and is the first to identify and analyze Delaware’s widespread use of implied consent statutes for corporate and noncorporate business entities. Not only is con-sent ultimately irrelevant, but jurisdiction over nonresident corporate officers based only on their corporate position is of uneasy constitutionality. This Article evaluates a solution to this problem: a movement from implied to express consent.
The Article also contributes to two current debates in corporate law. Courts and commentators have recently turned their attention to corporate officers, but they have ignored a necessary first step in the analysis, which this Article provides. Without personal jurisdiction over officers, state courts cannot even begin to develop the law about their duties or protections. Moreover, the Article fills a gap in the debate over how Delaware can keep its corporate law cases in its courts. It argues that implied consent statutes are designed to ensure that Delaware business law is adjudicated in Delaware, and that the constitutional due process limits analyzed here are an important obstacle to Delaware’s attempts to bundle its corporate law and forum.