FRCP 4 Help Forum

[thederangedwang]

4(k)(1)(A)

(1) In General. Serving a summons or filing a waiver of service establishes personal jurisdiction over a defendant:

(A) who is subject to the jurisdiction of a court of general jurisdiction in the state where the district court is located;

I basically have no idea what this means. It is basically a codification of Burham/Pennoyer where if you serve somebody in the state you have personal jurisdiction over them?



Edit: Got this from an outline: Authorizes exercise of PJ by a federal court only to the extent a state court where the summons happens could exercise jurisdiction under its long-arm statute

I dont understand how 4k1A translates into something about state court summons...

[bk1]

4k1A basically says that fed court PJ must look to the long arm statute of the state in which the fed court is in. You always have to serve a summons on someone even if you're not asserting transient jx (Burnham/Pennoyer are transient jx). But most state long arm statutes codify transient jx (serving someone with summons while they are in the state, see, e.g., IL Long Arm 5/2-209b1).