Opinion ID: 57421
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Texas long-arm, statute

Text: Pertinent here, the Texas long-arm statute states: In addition to other acts that may constitute doing business, a nonresident does business in this state if the nonresident: (1) contracts by mail or otherwise with a Texas resident and either party is to perform the contract in whole or in part in this state; [or] (2) commits a tort in whole or in part in this state;. . . . TEX. CIV. PRAC. & REM.CODE ANN. § 17.042. `[N]onresident' includes: (1) an individual who is not a resident of this state; and (2) a foreign corporation, joint-stock company, association, or partnership. TEX. CIV. PRAC. & REM.CODE ANN. § 17.041. One question arising from this language is whether the Commissioner, sued under the fiction created by Ex Parte Young, 209 U.S. 123, 28 S.Ct. 441, 52 L.Ed. 714 (1908), is an individual defendant within the terms of the statute. Ex Parte Young subjects a state employee acting in her official capacity to suits for prospective relief that avoid the Eleventh Amendment bar, but the employee's conduct remains state action under the Fourteenth Amendment. 17A Charles Alan Wright, Arthur R. Miller & Edward H. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 4231 (3d ed.2004); see also Home Tel. & Tel. Co. v. Los Angeles, 227 U.S. 278, 287-88, 33 S.Ct. 312, 57 L.Ed. 510 (1913). Although the Commissioner is an individual, she is acting in and was sued in her official capacity for enforcing Arizona statutes. Whatever may be the case for § 1983 suits against sister-state officials who are sued in their individual capacity, the Texas statute offers no obvious rationale for including nonresident individuals sued solely in their official capacity under Ex Parte Young. Moreover, the only other class of nonresident defined by the statute includes business entities but not fellow states. Whether the long-arm statute's definition of nonresidents ignores or subsumes the Ex Parte Young fiction is uncertain. A second statutory question is whether the Commissioner's enforcement of Arizona regulations constitutes doing business, making a contract, or committing a tortthe activities reached by the long-arm statute. The parties, pursuing a commonly used broad analogy between § 1983 suits and torts, characterize this suit as a tort claim. It is one thing to appropriate statutes of limitation and damage measures from tort causes of action into § 1983; these are practical, utilitarian decisions. It also seems normally accurate to describe as torts, even under the longarm, statute, § 1983 suits against public officials for individual misconduct. But the claim here is against the Commissioner in her official capacity, the essence of Ex Parte Young. [5] The parties may casually describe this case as a tort, even though it challenges not the Commissioner's abuse of power but her faithful enforcement of allegedly unconstitutional Arizona statutes, and it seeks not damages but an injunction against the statute's operation. This court, however, interpreted similar official conduct as the business of state regulation. See Great W. United Corp. v. Kid-well, 577 F.2d 1256, 1268 (5th Cir.1978), rev'd on other grounds sub nom. Leroy v. Great W. United Corp., 443 U.S. 173, 99 S.Ct. 2710, 61 L.Ed.2d 464 (1979). [6] These two competing approaches suggest that only by twisting the ordinary meaning of the terms covered by the long-arm statute is Arizona's regulatory activity intended to be encompassed and adjudicated in Texas courts. By conceding the application of the tort provision of the long-arm statute, the Commissioner relieves this court of an obligation to pursue these interpretive questions. We preserve them for posterity, noting that while there may be no constitutional impediment against Texas's decision to allow its courts to construe and perhaps overturn state officials' enforcement of sister state statutes, [7] and while the long-arm statute is coextensive with the limits of procedural due process for those people and entities and activities that it describes, the legislature may not have opened the courthouse doors to include this case.