@ BD Finch 19:43 Jan 31, 2019
You asked, "How can anything 'purposeful' exist "by accident"?"
Answer: because legalese is legalese. If you drive your car in State X, even if you don't realize you're in State X (for instance, because you got lost and don't have GPS), and you cause an accident, you can get sued in State X. The rationale, in legalese, is that you "purposefully availed" yourself of the laws of State X by driving there. No court is going to say, "Oh, you can't be sued here because you didn't realize you were here at the time."
Legal rules have to work in the real world. If we said accidentally driving into State X wasn't "purposeful availment," that would give drivers a huge incentive to lie ("Oh, I had no idea I was in state X, I drove there completely by accident"). So rather than creating a loophole based on something that cannot be proven, we just say, if you were intentionally driving, then we don't care whether you knew where you were -- that counts as purposeful availment. |