A New Reach for RICO and Antitrust Plaintiffs: Personal Jurisdiction After ‘Fuld v. PLO’

On June 20, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization, 606 U.S. 1 (2025), holding that the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause does not impose the same limits on personal jurisdiction as the Fourteenth Amendment. The case arose from two Anti-Terrorism Act suits brought by American victims of terror attacks against the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority. Most practitioners understandably viewed the decision as limited to terrorism litigation. That reading is too narrow. By decoupling the Fifth Amendment from the Fourteenth, Fuld unsettled a premise that has quietly governed federal-question litigation for decades: that a defendant sued in federal court is entitled to the same forum-by-forum minimum-contacts analysis that constrains state courts. For practitioners who bring civil RICO or antitrust claims under statutes that authorize nationwide service of process, the decision matters a great deal. Although the decision was unanimous as to the result and broad in its reasoning, the court declined to provide a precise test for what the Fifth Amendment now requires, leaving lower courts to resolve the boundaries as the law settles.

The Distinction Between Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Due Process

For most of the modern era, the federal courts of appeals had converged on an answer to a question the Supreme Court repeatedly reserved: whether the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments impose the same constraints on a court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction. The prevailing view was that they did, with both governed by the minimum-contacts standard announced in International Shoe v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310 (1945). The court rejected that equivalence in Fuld. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts reasoned that the states and the federal government occupy categorically different sovereign spheres: the Fourteenth Amendment’s limits protect interstate federalism by ensuring that one state does not reach beyond its borders into the domain of a coequal sovereign, while the federal government has no coequal sovereign within the Nation and possesses both nationwide and extraterritorial authority. Accordingly, the Fifth Amendment permits a more flexible inquiry commensurate with that broader authority.

The practical consequence is a split in the analysis of federal cases in which personal jurisdiction is authorized by a federal statute under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(k)(1)(C). When a plaintiff serves a defendant under such a statute, the constitutional measure is no longer the defendant’s contacts with the forum State but the defendant’s relationship to the United States as a whole. The court did not define how permissive that standard is and left open whether any minimum-contacts requirement survives; it resolved only that the statute before it satisfied due process because it tied jurisdiction to conduct bearing a meaningful relationship to the United States. Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in the judgment and joined in part by Justice Neil Gorsuch, would have held that the Fifth Amendment imposes no territorial limit on Congress’ power to reach foreign defendants; the majority did not adopt that view and left the question open.

Why ‘Fuld’ Reaches RICO and Antitrust

Fuld arose under a statute written for a single category of defendants, but its reasoning is not confined to that context. The mechanism that drives the decision is Rule 4(k)(1)(C), and that rule supports an entire family of federal statutes that authorize nationwide service of process—among them RICO,18 U.S.C. Section 1965, and antitrust laws in Section 12 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. Section 22, as well as securities laws, ERISA, and the bankruptcy code. The federal courts have long construed these provisions to permit jurisdiction based on a defendant’s contacts with the United States as a whole, subject to the limits of the Fifth Amendment. Before Fuld, many courts imported the Fourteenth Amendment’s minimum-contacts rigor into that inquiry; after Fuld, that practice is more difficult to justify. For a plaintiff suing a foreign defendant, the change is significant: the relationship between the defendant and the United States need only be meaningful, rather than the close, claim-specific tie the Fourteenth Amendment would demand. In a RICO action reaching offshore participants in a domestic enterprise—foreign holding entities, overseas financiers, or out-of-country co-conspirators—that is a more favorable standard than the one that governed a year ago.

Fuld does not stand alone. Yegiazaryan v. Smagin, 599 U.S. 533 (2023), addressed civil RICO’s domestic-injury requirement rather than personal jurisdiction, allowing foreign plaintiffs to allege domestic injury under a totality-of-the-circumstances approach. I addressed this issue in my November 2024 column. That decision, which involved a foreign judgment creditor alleging that the defendant used offshore entities to frustrate enforcement of a California judgment, opened RICO to foreign plaintiffs alleging domestic injury. Read together, the two cases move in the same direction: Smagin expands RICO’s reach for foreign plaintiffs, and Fuld relaxes the constitutional limits on reaching foreign defendants. The federal courts are steadily making civil RICO a more available instrument in transnational disputes.

The Third Circuit Framework and the Question ‘Fuld’ Raises

In the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the governing authority on RICO personal jurisdiction is Laurel Gardens v. McKenna, 948 F.3d 105 (3d Cir. 2020), a decision that arose out of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The plaintiffs named 33 defendants in an alleged racketeering enterprise organized to drive a landscaping and snow-removal business out of the market, pleading claims under 18 U.S.C. Section 1962(c) and (d).The district court dismissed the Delaware-based Isken defendants for lack of personal jurisdiction, applying Pennsylvania’s long-arm statute and the Fourteenth Amendment minimum-contacts test. The Third Circuit vacated. Resolving a question of first impression, it held that subsection (b) of Section 1965, rather than subsection (d), governs the exercise of personal jurisdiction and authorizes nationwide service of process. The rule has two components: when a civil RICO action is brought in a district that has personal jurisdiction over at least one defendant, summonses may be served nationwide on the remaining defendants if the ends of justice so require, a standard satisfied where no other district would have personal jurisdiction over all alleged co-conspirators. Because roughly half of the defendants were Pennsylvania residents or entities and the alleged scheme centered on Pennsylvania, no other forum could have reached every participant.

Fuld introduces tension into this framework. The Laurel Gardens analysis anchors itself in a forum-state defendant: the court must have traditional Fourteenth Amendment–style jurisdiction over at least one defendant before Section 1965(b) extends nationwide. Fuld, by contrast, instructs that in a federal-question case in which a statute authorizes service, the constitutional measure is the foreign defendant’s contacts with the United States as a whole. The two are not necessarily inconsistent; Laurel Gardens’s anchor-defendant and ends-of-justice requirements are a statutory and prudential gloss on Section 1965(b), not merely a recitation of the constitutional minimum. But Fuld loosens that minimum, and most clearly for the very defendants that the anchor-defendant rule was designed to reach through their domestic co-conspirators. The open question for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania is whether Fuld now provides an independent basis for jurisdiction over a foreign RICO defendant with a meaningful connection to the United States but few contacts with any particular state.

No published Third Circuit or Eastern District of Pennsylvania decision has yet applied Fuld to a Section 1965 RICO action, but an early application within the circuit has come in the antitrust context. In In re Diisocyanates Antitrust Litigation, 2026 WL 233978 (W.D.Pa. 2026), the District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania assessed jurisdiction over foreign parent corporations sued under Section 12 of the Clayton Act, which authorizes nationwide service. It read Fuld not to disturb the Clayton Act’s jurisdictional scope, holding that some showing of minimum contacts and purposeful availment remains necessary, and dismissed the foreign defendants on the facts. A securities decision from the Southern District of New York is to the same effect. In Orient Plus International v. Baosheng Media Group Holdings, 808 F.Supp.3d 609 (S.D.N.Y. 2025), the court exercised personal jurisdiction over foreign directors under Section 22 of the Securities Act, another nationwide-service statute that operates through Rule 4(k)(1)(C). There, too, the court declined to read Fuld as removing all territorial limits. Rejecting the maximalist theory the Fuld majority had left open, it borrowed the “sufficient nexus” standard the Second Circuit applies to extraterritorial criminal statutes and asked whether the defendants bore a meaningful relationship to the United States such that suit here would be neither arbitrary nor fundamentally unfair, finding that nexus in the directors’ alleged breach of duties Congress imposed to protect U.S. securities markets.

The lesson for the RICO practitioner is that Fuld opens the door but does not eliminate the threshold. A foreign RICO defendant must still be connected to the United States by conduct bearing a meaningful relationship to a federal interest; it cannot be haled into court here merely because it has been named in a complaint filed in this country. Practitioners in this circuit should expect the question to reach a RICO case before long.

A Pennsylvania Counterpoint: Consent to Jurisdiction Under ‘Mallory’

Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway, 600 U.S. 122 (2023), upheld a Pennsylvania statute requiring out-of-state corporations to consent to general personal jurisdiction in Pennsylvania as a condition of registering to do business in the commonwealth. Mallory is a Fourteenth Amendment decision about consent, and Fuld is a Fifth Amendment decision about sovereign authority; together they frame the modern personal-jurisdiction debate from opposite directions, one expanding what may count as a defendant’s consent to a state’s judicial power and the other expanding Congress’ power to reach defendants in federal court without their consent. For the litigator structuring a multi-defendant commercial or racketeering case, the two function as complementary tools: Mallory may provide a basis for jurisdiction over a registered corporate defendant in a Pennsylvania forum, while Fuld may provide the constitutional basis to bring a foreign co-defendant into the same federal RICO or antitrust action through nationwide service. The careful practitioner will consider both questions at the outset—which defendant anchors the forum, which statute authorizes service, and which constitutional clause supplies the governing test—rather than addressing personal jurisdiction only in response to a motion to dismiss.

Takeaways

When a plaintiff sues under a federal statute that authorizes nationwide service of process, the jurisdictional allegations should be framed in Fifth Amendment terms. Practitioners should plead the foreign defendant’s contacts with the United States as a whole and identify the Rule 4(k)(1)(C) authorization expressly, rather than defaulting to the forum-state minimum-contacts recitation. In the Third Circuit, practitioners should continue to satisfy Laurel Gardens on its own terms while preserving the separate argument that the Fifth Amendment independently supports jurisdiction over foreign defendants. For the defense, the reflexive challenge based on a foreign defendant’s lack of forum-state contacts is weaker than it was a year ago; the stronger objections are now statutory and prudential, directed at the anchor defendant, the ends-of-justice showing, venue, and the boundaries of the meaningful national connection that Fuld left undefined. Fuld reads at first glance as a narrow decision about two foreign defendants; it is better understood as a structural correction to how federal courts measure their own reach, and, for those who litigate civil RICO and antitrust claims, that reach has grown.