Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S.A. v. Brown

Facts

On April 18, 2004, a bus headed for Charles de Gaulle Airport overturned on a road outside Paris, France. Its passengers were young soccer players from North Carolina starting their trip home. Two 13-year-old boys, Julian Brown and Matthew Helms, were killed. The boys' parents blamed a tire that failed when its plies separated. It was a Goodyear Regional RHS tire made in Turkey by Goodyear Turkey. Goodyear Turkey, Goodyear France and Goodyear Luxembourg are indirect subsidiaries of Goodyear USA, an Ohio corporation. The three subsidiaries make tires mainly for European and Asian markets. They were not registered to do business in North Carolina and had no place of business, employees or bank accounts there. They did not design, make or advertise products there, solicit business there, or themselves sell or ship tires to customers there. Still, a small percentage of their tires, tens of thousands out of tens of millions made between 2004 and 2007, reached North Carolina through other Goodyear USA affiliates. These were usually custom ordered for specialized vehicles such as cement mixers, waste haulers, and boat and horse trailers. The subsidiaries said, and the parents did not deny in the Supreme Court, that the type of tire in the crash was never distributed in North Carolina. Goodyear USA itself had plants in North Carolina and regularly did business there.

Issues

1. Can North Carolina courts exercise general jurisdiction over foreign subsidiaries of a United States company, on claims unrelated to any activity of the subsidiaries in the State, because some of their tires reached the State through the stream of commerce?
2. Can the parents rely on a single-enterprise theory that treats all the Goodyear companies as one, when they did not raise it in the lower courts or in their brief opposing review?

Holding

North Carolina courts could not exercise general jurisdiction over the three foreign subsidiaries. The sporadic sales of their tires in North Carolina through intermediaries were too limited a connection, and the subsidiaries were in no sense at home in the State. The parents forfeited their single-enterprise theory, so the Court did not address it.