Bristol Myers Squibb Case: Specific Jurisdiction and the Sliding Scale

In Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of California, decided in 2017, the United States Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that a California state court could not hear the claims of hundreds of out-of-state plaintiffs suing the drugmaker over the blood thinner Plavix, because their injuries had no connection to California.¹ The decision tightened the rules for specific personal jurisdiction and rejected the theory that a company’s broad in-state business activity alone can justify hauling it into court over unrelated claims.²

The Underlying Lawsuit

A large group of plaintiffs sued Bristol-Myers Squibb in California state court, alleging that Plavix caused them serious health problems and that the company had used misleading advertising and failed to warn adequately about the drug’s risks. Some plaintiffs lived in California. Most did not.²

The non-resident plaintiffs had not bought Plavix in California, had not been prescribed it there, and had not been injured there. That disconnect between the plaintiffs’ experiences and the forum they had chosen became the whole issue.

General and Specific Jurisdiction

A state court’s power over an out-of-state defendant falls into two buckets. General jurisdiction reaches a company only where it is essentially “at home,” typically its state of incorporation or principal place of business, and allows suit on any claim.³ Specific jurisdiction is narrower: the plaintiff’s claim itself must arise out of or relate to the defendant’s activities in the forum state.²

Both limits come from the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The question in Bristol-Myers Squibb was about the second category, because no one argued California was the company’s home.

California’s Sliding Scale Theory

The California Supreme Court had upheld jurisdiction using what it called a sliding scale. Under that approach, the more extensive a defendant’s contacts with the state, the weaker the required link between those contacts and the specific claim.² Bristol-Myers Squibb ran research labs in California and employed sales representatives there, and it sold a large volume of Plavix to California residents. That footprint, the state court reasoned, was enough to cover the non-residents’ claims too.

What the Supreme Court Held

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, rejected the sliding scale outright. Specific jurisdiction requires an actual connection between the forum and the specific claim; a defendant’s unrelated in-state activity, however substantial, cannot substitute for that link.²

Applied to the case, the non-residents could point to nothing tying their injuries to California. They had not obtained Plavix through California sources, and the company had not developed, manufactured, labeled, packaged, or worked out the marketing for the drug in California. Without that link, California courts had no power over their claims.

The majority framed the limit as one of both defendant burden and interstate federalism. The Due Process Clause restrains one state from projecting its judicial power into disputes that belong elsewhere, even when the defendant does substantial business inside its borders.² A practical consequence is that plaintiffs from different states generally cannot pool unrelated claims in one favored forum; they need to sue where the defendant is at home or where their own injuries connect to the state.

The Dissent

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented alone.¹ She warned that the ruling would make it harder to bring nationwide mass actions against large corporations, because plaintiffs harmed by the same product but scattered across many states would struggle to consolidate their cases in a single court.

1
Supreme Court of the United States. Supreme Court Docket No. 16-466
2
Legal Information Institute. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of California – Section: Syllabus
3
Justia. Daimler AG v. Bauman