The Avails of Sales

Thurston v. Fairfield Collectables of Ga., LLC,  No. E072909 (D4d2 Aug. 26, 2020)

Defendant, which is located in Georgia, sells models over the Internet. It doesn’t have employees or stores in California, but it makes about 8 percent of its sales—about $350k annually—to customers here. Plaintiff, who is blind, brought an Unruh Act claim alleging that Defendant’s website did not accommodate her disability. The trial court quashed service for lack of personal jurisdiction.

So that gets us into the morass that is personal jurisdiction over the Internet. Personal jurisdiction requires: (1) contacts that demonstrate purposeful availment of the law of the forum state; (2) a connection between the contacts and the claim; and (3) the satisfaction of a gestalt test of overall reasonableness.

There are a whole bunch of tests for personal availment in the Internet context. The easiest one looks to whether the defendant used its Internet presence to make a substantial amount of sales to persons within forum state. Other tests also look for some state-specific direction of activity. The Court of Appeal here says that substantial sales are enough. But even if more direction were needed, there was some evidence that Defendant also mailed catalogs to Californians who requested them.

The Court says that relatedness is also satisfied. Even though Plaintiff never actually bought anything, her interaction with the website through which Defendant sold stuff to Californians was good enough. 

Finally, the exercise of jurisdiction was reasonable. Although Defendant argued that it was unfair to force it to comply with the laws of 50 different states, the jurisdiction question is different than the choice of law one. Just because Defendant can be made to litigate here, doesn’t mean California law will ultimately apply. 

Justice Menetrez dissents. His point is basically about relatedness. Because Plaintiff didn’t buy anything, her claim isn’t really related to any of Defendant’s California sales, regardless of volume. Her claim is, instead, based on the way that Defendant operated its website. But nothing about that purposefully availed itself of California. To me, that seems like a pretty good point.

Affirmed.