Supreme Court opinion cites work of UT Professor Judy Cornett

Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has cited Professors Judy Cornett and Michael Hoffmeier’s article Good-Bye Significant Contacts: General Personal Jurisdiction after Daimler AG v. Bauman, 76 Ohio St. L. J. 101 (2015) in Sotomayor’s opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part in BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell.

In their article, Cornett and Hoffmeier (Mississippi) criticized the court’s holding and analysis in Daimler AG v. Bauman and argued that “while the [Daimler] decision may achieve a level of certainty and predictability for which some commentators have longed, it has done so at the cost of restricting access to courts and through an exercise of tenuous constitutional authority that trespasses on the power of states and precludes more appropriate regulation by Congress.”

In her opinion, Justice Sotomayor notes her continued disagreement “with the path the Court struck in Daimler AG v. Bauman, 571 U. S. ___ (2014)” and cites the article in support of her assertion that “lower courts adhered to the continuous-and-systematic standard for decades before Daimler, and its predecessor Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S. A. v. Brown, 564 U. S. 915 (2011), wrought the present sea change.”