A Broadening of Diversity Jurisdiction
Students of civil procedure—which should mean just about everybody interested in using the formal processes of the law to vindicate rights—will be interested in a decision today by the United States Supreme Court. The opinion concerned the provision in the statutory grant of diversity jurisdiction that deems a corporation “to be a citizen of any State by which it has been incorporated and of the State where it has its principal place of business.” 28 U. S. C. §1332(c)(1) (emphasis added). There has been a longstanding imprecision—a lack of unanimity—within the lower federal courts as to whether a corporation’s “principal place of business” is its “nerve center,” “locus of operations,” “center of corporate activities,” “muscle center” (none of these latter four terms being statutory), or some otherwise determined place. In Hertz Corp. v. Friend, the Court resolved the matter.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on President Obama’s nomination of a Marquette lawyer—the Hon. James A. Wynn, Jr., L’79—to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Judge Wynn is a longtime member of the North Carolina Court of Appeals, and he has retained strong ties to Marquette Law School. In particular, he was our Hallows Judicial Fellow in 2002, delivering our Hallows Lecture (logically enough); received the All-University Alumni Merit Award in 2004; and spoke at the Law School’s commencement ceremony in 2007. I admire Judge Wynn very much, as I wrote in 
I had the opportunity last month to be involved in the presentation by our National Sports Law Institute of its