Respondeat superior and personal jurisdiction q Forum

[buckiguy_sucks]

Cross post from 1L thread b/c no one answered the Q:

Say D1 (a person) acting within his employment at D2(company) tortiously interfered with a contract between D3 and P (companies). All are totally diverse. D2 has no contacts to Ps home state.

D1 is on vacation and gets served in Ps home state. Does P's home state have personal jurisdiction over D3 because of respondeat superior?

This is like a mixed tort/civ prop q that I thought of while taking a practice test, but the prof didn't mention in his grading rubric, just wondering if you can get PJ over a corporate D because of respondeat basically.

[BVest]

Cross post from 1L thread b/c no one answered the Q:

Say D1 (a person) acting within his employment at D2(company) tortiously interfered with a contract between D3 and P (companies). All are totally diverse. D2 has no contacts to Ps home state.

D1 is on vacation and gets served in Ps home state. Does P's home state have personal jurisdiction over D3 because of respondeat superior?

This is like a mixed tort/civ prop q that I thought of while taking a practice test, but the prof didn't mention in his grading rubric, just wondering if you can get PJ over a corporate D because of respondeat basically.

Don't you mean over D2?

Anyway, you shouldn't really be too worried about stuff like this. If it takes you no more than a couple secs to mention it, then do so, but don't waste any time on an exam analyzing it unless you can do so in a way that directly uses the concepts and BLL that you were taught.

But I would say it there's no way there's PJ over D2 here. Had D1 directed some of his tortious acts toward P's home state, (and assuming, as you say, D1 was acting within his employment in committing the tortious interference) then you could argue (probably successfully) that D2 met the minimum contacts due to the actions of its employee acting as agent. However, in your case there's transient personal jurisdiction over D1 (he was served while vacationing personally in P's state) and you don't indicate any directed contacts, so the implication is that nothing other than transient jurisdiction was available. I'm not aware of anything that would extend transient jurisdiction of an employee to his employer under respondeat.

[buckiguy_sucks]

Don't you mean over D2?

Yeah I meant D2.

Makes sense, I was just curious.

I did write about it in the practice exam, but didn't waste a whole lot of time on it so I'm not that concerned about it. Will definitely try to avoid wasting time on the real exam though.

Thanks!

[AReasonableMan]

You would just approach it the same way you would for the other tortfeasor. Some of the personal jurisdiction factors overlap with tort factors ("reasonably foreseeable").