Pennoyer v. Neff, 95 U.S. 714, was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held that a court can exert personal jurisdiction over a party if that party is served with process while physically present within the state.
Factual and procedural background
Marcus Neff hired an attorney, John H. Mitchell, to help him with paperwork and other legal matters incidental to his efforts to obtain a land grant under the Donation Law of Oregon, an act of the United States Congress enacted on September 27, 1850 which provided an incentive for the development of land in the territories of the American West by conveying parcels of land to be used for further development. Neff was ultimately successful in procuring property on the ancestral homeland of the Multnomah Indian tribe in Multnomah County, Oregon. The property had an estimated value of $15,000 at the time. Mitchell later sued Neff in the Circuit Court of Multnomah County in the state of Oregon for outstanding debts related to his legal services but because Neff was not to be found there Mitchell won the lawsuit by default judgment which was entered in Mitchell's favor after Neff failed to appear in court. When Mitchell won the lawsuit in February 1866, Neff's land grant had not yet been conferred and consequently Mitchell, possibly waiting for the arrival of the grant, waited until July 1866 to levy execution on the property. Mitchell arranged for the sheriff to seize the land, purchased it at public auction, and subsequently assigned it to Sylvester Pennoyer causing Neff to sue Pennoyer in 1874 in federal court to recover his land. After Neff won, Pennoyer appealed to the United States Supreme Court.
Issue
The Supreme Court was asked to determine whether a state court has personal jurisdiction over a non-resident when such non-resident: did not voluntarily appear before the court; was not personally served with process while within the state; and the non-resident held property within the state at the time of the original lawsuit, but the property was not attached to the suit when it was initiated.
Result
The Supreme Court found for Neff and held that for the trial court to have jurisdiction over the property, the property needed to be attached before the start of litigation, whereupon the trial court has quasi in rem jurisdiction. Constructive notice as opposed to actual notice is insufficient under American law to inform a person living in another state except for cases affecting the personal status of an American plaintiff or cases that are in rem, in which the property sought is within the boundaries of the state and the law presumes that property is always in the possession of the owner, and the owner, therefore, knows what happens to the property. Thus, attachment of the property before judicial proceedings makes constructive notice sufficient.
Subsequent history
Many aspects of the Court's ruling in this case have subsequently been overturned for cases in which personal or in personam jurisdiction is concerned. In a long series of United States Supreme Court jurisprudence following this ruling, the Court has modified the territorial analysis without overruling its holding. Indeed, it seems the basis of a state's authority to decide the "status" of its citizens, for example, as in a divorce without having personal jurisdiction over the respondent remains undisturbed. The United States Supreme Court has ruled that all determinations of state-court personal jurisdiction must be evaluated in light of and via application of the doctrine of "minimum contacts." The "minimum contacts test" is now used almost exclusively in accordance with these decisions and has also been held to apply to jurisdictional analysis in federal court settings as well as state courts. The doctrines governing personal jurisdiction in the United States have spawned a great deal of discourse within the Supreme Court of the United States with many cases finetuning and elaborating upon the concept, which has led to the test used today, in which the overall scope of the test for determining whether a court may exert personal jurisdiction over a party has been expanded in certain respects but narrowed in others. Nevertheless, in every case, the Supreme Court has ruled that such analyses must comport with the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In law schools, the Pennoyer case is commonly taught in civil procedure classes. While scholars disagree as to the extent that federal legal procedure remains bound to its direct legacy, Pennoyer is a seminal sample of early jurisdictional jurisprudence.
