§ 8.01-328.1.When personal jurisdiction over person may be exercised.

Section 8.01-328.1 is the specific-jurisdiction backbone of Virginia civil procedure: a court may reach a person, acting directly or through an agent, but only as to a cause of action that arises from one of the ten categories of Virginia contact the statute enumerates. This is not general jurisdiction over anything the defendant has ever done — it is jurisdiction tied to the particular conduct that connects the defendant to the Commonwealth.

The commercial and property-based grounds cover a wide range of contacts: transacting any business in Virginia; contracting to supply services or things here; causing tortious injury by an act or omission within Virginia; causing tortious injury within Virginia through an act or omission committed elsewhere, when the defendant regularly does or solicits business, engages in any other persistent course of conduct, or derives substantial revenue from goods used or consumed or services rendered in Virginia; causing injury here through breach of a warranty made on goods sold outside Virginia, when the defendant might reasonably have expected the injured person to use, consume, or be affected by those goods in Virginia and the same persistent-contacts or substantial-revenue condition is met; having an interest in, using, or possessing real property in Virginia; and contracting to insure a person, property, or risk located in Virginia at the time the insurance contract was made.

Three more grounds reach family-support and tax obligations, and two of them come with their own proof-of-service conditions. A person may be subject to jurisdiction for having executed a Virginia agreement obligating him to pay spousal or child support to a Virginia domiciliary or a qualifying military or foreign-service spouse — valid only on proof that the nonresident was served by a law-enforcement officer or other person authorized to serve process where the nonresident is located — for having been ordered to pay such support by a Virginia court with personal jurisdiction over him, or for having shown through personal conduct in Virginia — alleged by affidavit — that he conceived or fathered a child here, a basis valid only on proof of personal service under § 8.01-320. Jurisdiction also reaches a person who maintained a matrimonial domicile in Virginia at the relevant time in a divorce or separate-maintenance action, if the other spouse still resides here — valid only on proof that the nonresident was served under § 8.01-296 by someone authorized under § 8.01-320 — and a person who incurred liability for taxes, fines, penalties, interest, or other charges owed to a Virginia political subdivision.

Two further provisions round out the statute. Subsection B treats the use of a computer or computer network located in Virginia as an act in the Commonwealth, extending the statute’s reach to online conduct. And subsection C makes clear that when jurisdiction rests solely on this section, only a cause of action arising from the enumerated conduct may be asserted — but nothing in the chapter limits or restricts the jurisdiction Virginia courts otherwise have over foreign corporations subject to service of process under any other statute.