Court Opinion

ID: 9486039
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:36:34.456214+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:30.238017
License: Public Domain

SHADUR, Senior District Judge,
concurring in the result.
Determining where an individual “may be found” ordinarily poses no difficulties: That locution is normally understood in its literal sense of the individual’s physical presence. Indeed, for a long time the one-to-one correlation between the concept of being “found” in a place and being physically present there marked the outer limit of a court’s — and hence of an opposing litigant’s — ability to *452exercise power over an individual defendant (Pennoyer v. Neff, 95 U.S. 714, 24 L.Ed. 565 (1877)). In those days it would have been unheard of to question the concept that tagging an individual with a summons within a jurisdiction was enough to subject that individual to judicial proceedings within the jurisdiction (the same issue that, because of intervening basic changes in the constitutional approach to defining a defendant’s amenability to suit, splintered the Supreme Court a few years ago in Burnham v. Superior Court of California, 495 U.S. 604, 110 S.Ct. 2105, 109 L.Ed.2d 631 (1990)).
But when we shift from the individual to an incorporeal entity — a corporation — the notion of where the defendant “may be found” shifts from the physical to the metaphysical. Corporations do present enough of a parallel to individuals to say, without fear of disagreement, that a corporation is certainly “found” where its plant and its principal offices are located. But once the jurisdictional ties are attenuated — as in determining what “contacts” the corporation has with the forum (“contacts” is itself a term that sounds physical, but that also requires personification when it is applied to a disembodied legal concept such as a corporation) — any attempt to define where the corporation “may be found” necessarily involves one or more legal fictions.
Of course most of the law as to this particular legal fiction (the question as to where a corporation is considered “found”) has been generated in the course of deciding where the corporation is subject to suit. Little wonder, then, that the cases dealing with the problem that we are considering today — the meaning of the phrase “may be found” in 28 U.S.C. § 1400(a) (“Section 1400(a)”), a venue statute — have uniformly drawn on the amenability of the defendant to be sued in the forum under applicable state law. More on this subject a bit later.
Where I part company with the majority is in its abandonment of that universally-accepted principle — in its having stated instead, as a universal rule, that a corporation “may be found” throughout a state so as to be suable anywhere within the state, yet that it somehow “may [not] be’found” throughout that same state for venue purposes. As it happens, a narrower notion of where a corporation “may be found” does not pose a problem in Wisconsin, so that I have no difficulty in concurring in the result reached by the majority.1 But this Court presides over cases that emanate from three states, and the majority opinion reaches out unnecessarily to announce what I submit would be the wrong result if this were an Illinois case.
Let us examine that last question by turning to the contrast between Wisconsin law and Illinois law as posed by the case at hand, for that contrast demonstrates the more limited scope of pronouncement that would resolve this case without creating problems in any cases that are not now before us. Illinois law (like that of most states) defines amenability to process in statewide terms (see 735 ILCS 5/2-209, the Illinois long-arm statute). But quite unlike Wisconsin, Illinois also expressly permits any foreign corporation over which jurisdiction is obtained via that long-arm statute to be sued in any county in the state. That result flows from the interaction of 735 ILCS 5/2-102(a), which defines such a corporation as a nonresident of Illinois, and id. 5/2-101, which says that an action against any Illinois nonresident “may be commenced in any county.”
In Illinois, then, a foreign corporation that may be haled into court only via long-arm treatment (that is, under circumstances exemplified by those involving Fjeld Manufacturing here) is considered to be “found” in every one of Illinois’ 102 counties. It does not matter that its only Illinois “contacts” may be with East St. Louis or Champaign— it may still be sued in Cook County, because the Illinois statutory fiction that defines where the incorporeal entities that we -call corporations are “found” treats such a foreign corporation as being “found” everywhere in Illinois.2 And if the corporation thus “may *453be found” in Cook County, it is really tautological to say that it also “may be found” in the Northern District of Illinois (of which Cook County is a part) — that is, to say that the Northern District is indeed “the district in which the defendant ... may be found” (the Section 1400(a) language), so as to lodge copyright vénue in this district in the situation posited in this paragraph.
Do the authorities cited at pages 446 and 447 in the majority opinion call for a different result? Not at all. To deal with them in the order of citation there (and not their importance):
1. It is true that the editor of Moore’s Federal Practice does say that “it appears” that the contacts for venue purposes must be with the particular district. But (a) such a professorial ipse dixit, advanced without any support, does not of course control the judicial function and (b) perhaps more important, nothing suggests that the editor has ever thought about (or even thought of) the point that is made here.
2. As for the Abrams text, the discussion therte presents a more extended analysis of a set of related questions, and it does advocate the rule that the majority adopts. But like Moore’s it does not at all address the kind of situation posed by Illinois law — and as with Moore’s there is no hint that the author has considered (or even thought of) the very different (and distorted) application of the rule under such circumstances. In fact, a number of the cases that Abrams cites (a group of those referred to in his Section 13.05[C][1], at 13-22 n. 76) specifically state the “may be found” venue test in ways that would indeed cause an Illinois long-arm defendant to be considered “found” for venue purposes in every district court in this state, so long as its Illinois-oriented activities (whether in or out of the district where suit is later brought) have made it subject to personal jurisdiction anywhere in the State of Illinois.
3. As for the other procedural treatise cited by the majority, Wright & Miller does not state any such rule as Moore’s— instead, it merely cites to the Geo-Physical case as an illustration.
4. In turn, Geo-Physical deals with the physical service of process (that is, the Pennoyer v. Neff type of service) on a nonresident individual within a district. In that situation the case says (understandably and quite correctly) that the district was the only one in that state in which the individual was “found.” That of course is very different from the analysis that properly applies to a corporation that is metaphysically “found” in a state only through application of the long-arm statute, and that is physically served with process outside of that state.
5. Professor Goldstein’s brief statement simply draws on the same few cases that are cited in the majority opinion and discussed here, so it adds nothing to the analysis beyond what is said in this opinion.
6. Finally, Lumiere v. Mae Edna Wilder, Inc. really comes within the selfsame category as Geo-Physical: It too deals with the very different issue of where an individual “may be found” based on physical service within the jurisdiction. It is worth observing that Lumiere stems from an era when amenability to process was limited to an individual’s physical presence (again in the Pennoyer v. Neff mold), before all of the developments in the law that now allow defendants to be haled into court in jurisdictions where they have no.1) actually been physically served with a summons. And Lumiere simply said in that context that the then-existing venue stat*454ute, which permitted suit in a district where a corporation’s individual agent “may be found,” required that he or she be served in a district while engaged in corporate business (that is, while acting qua “agent”) and not while he or she is a temporary visitor on his or her own private account.
To return to what the cases really say, let me scotch any notion that what is set forth here is just my own ipse dixit, to be set in opposition to that in Moore’s. On the contrary, my independent research has led to some dozens of cases that justify the statement made in Sollinger v. Nasco Int’l, Inc., 655 F.Supp. 1385, 1389 (D.Vt.1987):
The cases are virtually legion which hold that for purposes of § 1400(a), a corporate is “found” in any district in which personal jurisdiction may be asserted over it.
Those many cases of course may employ slightly differing locutions, but they are all variants on the identical theme — for example, my former colleague Judge Nicholas Bua said in Gallery House, Inc. v. Yi, 587 F.Supp. 1036, 1039 (N.D.Ill.1984):
Under 28 U.S.C. § 1400(a) the test for determining whether a nonresident defendant “may be found” within a district is the same as that for determining personal jurisdiction.
And in that respect Judge Bua then addressed the question in terms of whether “the defendant could reasonably anticipate being subject to suit in the forum state.’’
At least one case out of that host of authorities — all of which point in the identical direction — may be worth mentioning specifically, for it speaks to a concept of “may be found” that is wholly parallel to the one employed by Illinois law. In Mihalek Corp. v. State of Michigan, 595 F.Supp. 903 (E.D.Mieh.1984) Senior District Judge Charles Joiner dealt with an action asserting copyright infringement claims (among others) not only against the State of Michigan but against its Governor and its Secretary of Commerce as well.3 Judge Joiner — also having conducted his own research — rejected the “preposterous” notion that the existence of a state-operated liquor store in Ann Arbor (that is, in Michigan’s Eastern District) vested his court with venue there. But even though the individual defendants were physically present only within the Western District, he then went on to hold that because under state law those individuals were “amenable to personal jurisdiction throughout this state, including the area comprised by the Eastern District of this state” (id. at 907), they were also “found” within the Eastern District for Section 1400(a) purposes. That is precisely the line of analysis that calls for the identical conclusion under Illinois law.
Nor has the “legion” of cases stopped marching with Sollinger. Despite my general aversion to string citations (not the least of the reasons being the need to read all of the cases before citing them), in this instance it may be worth referring to what a quick U.S.C.A. and LEXIS search of post-Sollinger decisions in this area turns up: over a dozen decisions, including (to list only those that are reported in F.Supp. or that the LEXIS printout indicates are awaiting such reporting) Editorial Musical Latino Americana, S.A. v. Mar Int’l Records, Inc., 829 F.Supp. 62, 66 (S.D.N.Y.1993); Munoz v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co., 829 F.Supp. 309, 312 (D.Alaska 1993); Reliance Elevator Co. v. Miller, No. 92 C 3703, 1993 WL 34718, at *4, 1993 U.S.Dist. LEXIS 1298, at *4 (N.D.Ill. Feb. 8, 1993); Johannsen v. Brown, 788 F.Supp. 465, 469 (D.Ore.1992); Lipton v. Nature Co., 781 F.Supp. 1032, 1035 (S.D.N.Y.1992); Store Decor Div’n v. Stylex Worldwide Indus., Ltd., 767 F.Supp. 181, 185 (N.D.Ill.1991); ISC-Bunker Ramo Corp. v. Altech, Inc., 765 F.Supp. 1310, 1329 (N.D.Ill. 1990); Advideo, Inc. v. Kimel Broadcast Group, Inc., 727 F.Supp. 1337, 1341 (N.D.Cal.1989); Microsoft Corp. v. Very Competitive Computer Prod., Inc., 671 *455F.Supp. 1250, 1256 (N.D.Cal.1987). Competitive Computer Prod., Inc., 671 F.Supp. 1250, 1256 (N.D.Cal.1987).
It is scarcely worth heaping Pelion on Ossa — every court that deals with the issue continues to speak in terms of equating where a defendant (most particularly a corporate defendant) “may be found” in Section 1400(a) to where that corporation may be sued (that is, where it is subject to personal jurisdiction). And once that is recognized, the very fact that under Illinois law a foreign corporation such as Fjeld Manufacturing would be considered as “found” in every county in Illinois necessarily carries with it the conclusion that the corporation would be deemed “found” in each of Illinois’ three federal districts that embrace all those counties. And so a literal reading of Section 1400(a) — starting with “the language of the statute itself,” as the majority urges at page 8 — would lead to a totally different conclusion in Illinois from the one that the majority announces here as a universal rule.
Having said all this, let me deal briefly with the reason that the majority’s handling of this case poses no such problem. Wisconsin (like most states, I believe) permits a foreign corporation over which jurisdiction is obtained under its long-arm statute to be sued only in a county where it “does substantial business” (Wis.Stat. § 801.50(2)(e), construed for the first time as to the “substantial business” test in Enpro Assessment Corp. v. Plus, Inc., 171 Wis.2d 542, 492 N.W.2d 325 (Wis.Ct.App.1992)). Where a foreign corporation such as Fjeld Manufacturing does not “do[ ] substantial business” in any of the counties making up the Eastern District of Wisconsin, it is not then considered as being “found” in any of those counties. And that being true, it is perforce not “found” within the Eastern District. That is all that is necessary to affirm the result reached by the district court in this case, and I respectfully submit that the majority opinion ought to stop there.
This opinion might be prolonged by responding point by point to the majority opinion’s references to what I have written here. But that would not add much to the dialogue, for it is unfortunately all too evident from reading those comments in the majority opinion that we are like ships that pass in the night. In my view the majority has succumbed to the tyranny of labels in stating its rule overbroadly, but of course I respect the fact that judicial perceptions may differ in that regard.
In sum, for the reasons stated here, I respectfully concur only in the result reached by the majority opinion.

. As for the majority opinion’s other two rulings — its disposition of the sanctions issue and its vacation of the district court's attorneys' fees and costs ruling — I concur in those results as well.

. Amenability to suit in a location (in the venue sense) is, of course, a question quite separate from and antecedent to the question whether an application of the forum non conveniens doctrine *453(the state law vehicle) or a 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a) motion may thereafter determine that the action should be transferred elsewhere because of considerations of convenience. That distinction undercuts the significance of inconvenience as such as a compelling factor in construing Section 1400(a) — a factor that is adverted to at page 446 n. 9 of the majority opinion here. Judge Wisdom’s opinion in Time, Inc. v. Manning, 366 F.2d 690, 696 (5th Cir.1966), cited by the majority opinion in that respect, makes the perceptive point (originally advanced by Judge Learned Hand) that both jurisdiction and venue test the elements of fairness and convenience to a defendant in a particular forum, occupying different points on the continuum along which those concepts apply.

. After dispatching the bulk of plaintiff’s claims on Eleventh Amendment grounds (id. at 905-06), Judge Joiner found that the copyright action seeking injunctive relief against the state officials survived. That then provided the framework for deciding the venue issue that corresponds to the one before us.