Personal Jurisdiction in the Age of the Internet

To underscore the uncertainty of personal jurisdiction in the age of the Internet, I want to briefly note a recent decision reported out of the District of Columbia concerning the District's long-arm statute.  The case, Lewy v. Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc., available here, concerns allegations that the defendant published defamatory statements about the plaintiff in both print and online publications.  The out-of-state defendants to the action consist of the author of the statements and the organization for which he works.  The D.C. long-arm statute provides, in part, that a D.C. court may exercise personal jurisdiction over a person as to a claim for relief for causing a tortious injury in D.C. by an act or omission in the District of Columbia.  Although the defendant published materials that were both mailed to D.C. and viewed over the internet by persons located in D.C., the court noted, in a rather off-hand manner, that when a D.C. plaintiff is injured by a defamatory article published in and mailed from another state, the tortious act is considered to have occured outside the District of Columbia and the injury is considered to have occurred inside the District of Columbia. 

Note that the decision in Lewy is much different from the conclusion reached by the Supreme Court of Florida when construing a similar statute.  Here, I previously explained that the Supreme Court of Florida held that if material posted on a website about a Florida resident is not only accessible in Florida, but actually accessed by a person in Florida, that is sufficient to constitute the commission of the tortious act of defamation within Florida.  I also explained why I believed the decision to be wrong.

What is worth remembering from these decisions is that courts across the country are in disagreement about where Internet-related torts actually occur.