Court Opinion

ID: 9589667
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:47:21.704839+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:27:46.657020
License: Public Domain

Beasley, Chief Judge,
concurring specially.
The nonresident defendant does transact business within Georgia and could come under the first ground which OCGA § 9-10-91 provides for the exercise of personal jurisdiction over it. In this regard, there are enough of those “minimum contacts” which would satisfy federal and state constitutional due process concerns.
The problem is that the cause of action in this case did not arise from any of the acts or omissions in the transaction of that business, which is another requirement of long arm jurisdiction under that statute. They arose out of an airplane crash in Kentucky.
The dissent would hold that there was jurisdiction over the nonresident beyond the confines of the Long Arm Statute. Although that might be possible under constitutional due process law, as recognized in Gust v. Flint, 257 Ga. 129 (356 SE2d 513) (1987), that is not Georgia’s law. “[T]he requirement that a cause of action ‘arise out of activities within the state (OCGA § 9-10-91), applies ... to the exercise of personal jurisdiction over nonresidents.” Allstate Ins. Co. v. Klein, 262 Ga. 599, 600 (422 SE2d 863) (1992).
Justice Gregory, in his concurring opinion in Gust, proposed that Georgia revise its law so that “its courts [would] have the maximum jurisdiction permissible within constitutional due process.” Id. at 130. The Supreme Court had earlier noted, in a case involving subsection (3) rather than purportedly subsection (1), that “the policy of our Long Arm Statute is to exercise jurisdiction over nonresident defendants to the maximum extent permitted by procedural due process. [Cit.]” Bradlee Mgmt. Svcs. v. Cassells, 249 Ga. 614, 617 (292 SE2d 717) (1982). It extracted this statement from the decision in Coe & Payne Co. v. Wood-Mosaic Corp., 230 Ga. 58 (195 SE2d 399) (1973), which was reaffirmed in Clarkson Power Flow v. Thompson, 244 Ga. 300 (260 SE2d 9) (1979). Whether the boundaries of our Long Arm Statute are coextensive with those of constitutional due process or not, we can neither change the boundaries of our Long Arm Statute nor create new ones outside it. This is beyond our judicial powers.
With this in mind, I cannot agree with the statement in the majority opinion that “[a] finding of jurisdiction over a nonresident outside the confines of the Long Arm Statute ‘would result in an unconstitutionally broad construction of the statute. [Cit.]” Majority at pp. 3-4. This may or may not be so. The quotation is taken from a case in which it was held that there were insufficient contacts existing *6between this state and the foreign defendant state in the particular circumstances to satisfy constitutional due process. Consequently the court in that case, State of South Carolina v. Reeves, 205 Ga. App. 656 (423 SE2d 32) (1992), refused to construe Georgia’s Long Arm Statute as broadly as the appellee desired.
I am authorized to state that Presiding Judge Pope joins in this special concurrence.