Art. 6.Jurisdiction Over the Person

Most people who have heard of personal jurisdiction know it from common-law due-process cases asking whether a defendant has enough contact with a state to be sued there. Louisiana approaches the same problem with its own statutory list. Article 6 says a court gets personal jurisdiction — the power to enter a judgment binding on a specific party — in one of three ways: proper service of process on the defendant or an agent, service on a court-appointed attorney representing an absent or incompetent Louisiana domiciliary, or the party's own submission to the court by filing suit or by missing the deadline to object.

Paragraph B adds the long-arm piece that lets Louisiana reach beyond its own domiciliaries. A Louisiana court can exercise personal jurisdiction over a nonresident on any basis the state and federal constitutions allow — which, in practice, means the familiar minimum-contacts standard that traces back to Pennoyer v. Neff, 95 U.S. 714 (1878), and its descendants. Louisiana didn't need to write a long list of specific long-arm grounds, because this paragraph reaches as far as the United States Constitution permits.

The distinction that matters in practice: service establishes jurisdiction over Louisiana domiciliaries and defendants found here, while Paragraph B covers everyone else, as long as the constitutional minimum-contacts test is satisfied. A defendant who wants to contest personal jurisdiction has to raise it early, through the declinatory exception, or risk being found to have submitted to the court's power by default.