Justified Party Expectations in Choice-of-Law and Jurisdiction: Constitutional Significance or Bootstrapping

This Article examines the role that a party's legal and factual expectations play in determining the reach of a state's power over them. The author argues that perceptions of fairness are substituted for the actual volition of the parties to be validated through other means, whereas the parties' factual expectations do carry weight in determining the reach of a state's power of over them. The author suggests that recent Supreme Court decisions on jurisdictional due process employ a methodology that satisfactorily distinguishes between expectations of law and fact. The author contrasts this approach with that taken in Allstate Insurance Co. v. Hague, in which the Court reconstructed and relied on hypothetical expectations which did not materialize, and suggests that its import should be limited on its facts to the insurance field.