Jurisdiction and Choice-of-Forum Doctrines

Jurisdiction and choice-of-forum doctrines are civil procedure rules by which a court that technically has the power to hear a case nonetheless declines to exercise it, or governs which body of law applies once the case proceeds, out of respect for the more appropriate authority of another court or sovereign. Forum non conveniens lets a court dismiss a case it could otherwise hear because another available forum, often in a different country or state, would try the dispute more appropriately, weighing the location of evidence, witnesses and the parties' own convenience. Abstention doctrines direct a United States federal court to decline or pause a case that would intrude on a pending state court proceeding or an area of law the state courts are better positioned to resolve, respecting the constitutional balance between federal and state judicial power. The Erie doctrine addresses the closely related question of which law applies once a federal court properly exercises jurisdiction over a state law claim through diversity of citizenship, requiring the federal court to apply the substantive law of the state in which it sits rather than fashioning its own general federal common law. Each doctrine is a distinct limit that federal or common law courts impose on themselves to keep the exercise of jurisdiction and the choice of applicable law aligned with the forum that most legitimately owns the dispute.