Does the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment permit a California court to exercise general personal jurisdiction over a foreign corporation for claims by foreign plaintiffs arising from conduct occurring entirely abroad, based on the in-state contacts of the corporation's U.S. subsidiary?

Twenty-two residents of Argentina sued DaimlerChrysler Aktiengesellschaft (Daimler), a German public stock company headquartered in Stuttgart that manufactures Mercedes-Benz vehicles in Germany, in the Northern District of California. The complaint alleged that during Argentina's 1976\u20131983 "Dirty War," Daimler's Argentinian subsidiary, Mercedes-Benz Argentina (MB Argentina), collaborated with state security forces at its Gonzalez Catan plant to kidnap, detain, torture, and kill workers, including plaintiffs or their relatives. Plaintiffs asserted claims under the Alien Tort Statute, the Torture Victim Protection Act, and California and Argentina law, seeking to hold Daimler vicariously liable. No part of the alleged conduct occurred in California or the United States.

Personal jurisdiction was predicated on the California contacts of Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC (MBUSA), a Delaware limited liability company with its principal place of business in New Jersey. MBUSA served as Daimler's exclusive importer and distributor in the United States, purchasing vehicles from Daimler and distributing them to independent dealerships nationwide. MBUSA maintained several California facilities, was the largest supplier of luxury vehicles in California, and its California sales accounted for 2.4% of Daimler's worldwide sales. A General Distributor Agreement designated MBUSA an independent contractor, not Daimler's agent.

Plaintiffs filed suit in 2004 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Daimler moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. After allowing jurisdictional discovery on plaintiffs' agency allegations, the District Court granted the motion, holding that Daimler's own California contacts were too sporadic for general jurisdiction and that plaintiffs had not shown MBUSA acted as Daimler's agent. The Ninth Circuit initially affirmed, finding no agency relationship warranting attribution of MBUSA's contacts to Daimler, with Judge Reinhardt dissenting. The panel then granted plaintiffs' petition for rehearing, withdrew its opinion, and issued a new opinion authored by Judge Reinhardt reversing, holding that MBUSA was Daimler's agent for jurisdictional purposes because it performed services important to Daimler. The Ninth Circuit denied rehearing en banc over the dissent of eight judges. The Supreme Court granted certiorari.

(Ginsburg, J.)

No. Daimler is not amenable to general jurisdiction in California for claims by foreign plaintiffs based on conduct occurring entirely outside the United States.

General jurisdiction over a foreign corporation exists only when its affiliations with the forum State are so continuous and systematic as to render it essentially at home there. Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S.A. v. Brown, 564 U.S. ___ (2011). For a corporation, the paradigm all-purpose forums are its place of incorporation and principal place of business. Neither Daimler nor MBUSA is incorporated in California or has its principal place of business there.

The Ninth Circuit's agency theory fails regardless of whether agency could ever support general jurisdiction. Its test asked whether the subsidiary's services were important enough that the parent would perform them itself if the subsidiary did not exist. That inquiry stacks the deck, because it always yields a pro-jurisdiction answer and would subject foreign corporations to general jurisdiction wherever they have an in-state subsidiary, exceeding even the sprawling view rejected in Goodyear.

Even assuming MBUSA is at home in California and its contacts are imputable to Daimler, Daimler is not at home there. Plaintiffs' formulation, that general jurisdiction lies wherever a corporation engages in a substantial, continuous, and systematic course of business, is unacceptably grasping. International Shoe used "continuous and systematic" to describe specific jurisdiction; for general jurisdiction it required operations so substantial as to justify suit on claims arising from entirely distinct dealings. The inquiry is whether the corporation's affiliations render it essentially at home, appraised in light of its activities nationwide and worldwide. A corporation operating in many places cannot be deemed at home in all of them. An exceptional case, like Perkins v. Benguet Consol. Mining Co., 342 U.S. 437 (1952), may exist, but Daimler's California activities do not approach it.

International comity reinforces this result. Plaintiffs' ATS and TVPA claims are infirm under Kiobel and Mohamad, and other nations, including the European Union, do not share such expansive jurisdictional views. The judgment is reversed.

Concurrence in judgment (Sotomayor, J.) The judgment should be reversed, but on the narrower ground that exercising jurisdiction over Daimler would be unreasonable under Asahi Metal Industry Co. v. Superior Court, 480 U.S. 102 (1987), because foreign plaintiffs are suing a foreign defendant over foreign conduct and a more appropriate forum, Germany, is available. The majority decides the case on a ground neither argued nor decided below, raised only in a footnote of Daimler's merits brief, and the record on Daimler's California contacts is undeveloped. On the merits, the majority's proportionality approach, which compares in-state contacts to a defendant's worldwide operations, departs from precedent. Perkins, Helicopteros, and Goodyear focused solely on in-state contacts, consistent with the principle of reciprocal fairness: a company that enjoys a State's benefits submits to its courts. The rule is unpredictable, curtails state sovereignty, favors large multinational corporations over small businesses, treats corporations more leniently than individuals served while visiting a State, and shifts the risk of loss to injured individuals. Concerns about burdens on corporate defendants are better addressed through the reasonableness inquiry, forum non conveniens, change of venue, and legislation. The majority answered in footnote 20 that the at home inquiry appraises a corporation's activities in their entirety, that little discovery is needed to find where a corporation is at home, and that the reasonableness check belongs to specific jurisdiction, so importing it into general jurisdiction would compound the inquiry.