THE RATIO. One judgment, decoded twice: once for anyone, once for the profession.

Case Details

  • Citation: No. 24-6215 (9th Cir. Aug. 3, 2026); D.C. No. 3:24-cv-00372-MMA-DEB (S.D. Cal.)
  • Court: United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, on appeal from the Southern District of California (Judge Michael M. Anello)
  • Decided: August 3, 2026 (argued and submitted December 3, 2025, Pasadena, California)
  • Parties: Shenzhen Zehuijin Investment Center, Limited Partnership (Petitioner-Appellee) v. Liu Yingkui (Respondent-Appellant); Zhang Xin was a co-respondent below but is not a party to this appeal
  • Counsel: Lena Streisand, Proskauer Rose LLP, and Meaghan Gragg, Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP, for the Investment Center; Anthony J. Dain, Procopio Cory Hargreaves & Savitch LLP, for Liu
  • Governing provisions: Federal Arbitration Act chapter 2, 9 U.S.C. Sections 201 to 208, implementing the New York Convention; Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause; Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(2), 12(b)(5), 12(g), 12(h)
  • Key precedents applied: Burnham v. Superior Court of California, 495 U.S. 604 (1990); Insurance Corp. of Ireland, Ltd. v. Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinee, 456 U.S. 694 (1982); Daimler AG v. Bauman, 571 U.S. 117 (2014); Mississippi Publishing Corp. v. Murphree, 326 U.S. 438 (1946); Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co., 339 U.S. 306 (1950); Martinez v. Aero Caribbean, 764 F.3d 1062 (9th Cir. 2014)
  • Key pages: pp. 6 to 13 cover personal jurisdiction, pp. 13 to 15 cover waiver of the service of process defense. This opinion runs by page rather than numbered paragraph.

Headnote

A Chinese investment fund won a large arbitration award against a borrower who later moved to California and never paid. When the fund tried to enforce that award in a US court, the borrower argued the court had no power over him because nobody had personally handed him the court papers, even though he had received them by other means and admitted knowing about the lawsuit. The Ninth Circuit disagreed. Once someone is physically living in a state, that alone gives its courts authority over them, and the constitution does not require the paperwork to be placed directly in their hands rather than left with someone at their home, mailed, or emailed. The borrower also tried to argue the specific mailing method broke the rules, but he had never raised that particular objection in the trial court, so the appeals court would not hear it now.

Factual Background

In 2017, Shenzhen Zehuijin Investment Center, a Chinese investment partnership, loaned Liu Yingkui approximately 160 million yuan. Liu did not repay it. The Investment Center pursued arbitration before the Beijing Arbitration Commission and obtained an award of around 150 million yuan. A Singaporean court separately ordered Liu to pay the award, but he still did not comply.

The Investment Center then sought to enforce the award in the United States under Chapter 2 of the Federal Arbitration Act, which implements the New York Convention and lets domestic courts confirm foreign arbitral awards. Knowing Liu had been living in the San Diego area, the Investment Center filed a confirmation petition in the Southern District of California. A process server made two failed attempts to hand Liu the papers directly. On the third attempt, the server left the petition with an adult at Liu’s residence who identified herself as a cotenant, then followed up by first class mail and email. Liu had lived at that California address for around two years and admitted he received notice of the lawsuit.

Liu moved to dismiss, but his motion invoked only Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(2), arguing the court lacked personal jurisdiction because he was domiciled in China and the underlying loan and arbitration had no connection to California. He never cited Rule 12(b)(5), the separate rule governing insufficient service of process. The district court held that it had general personal jurisdiction because Liu was served with process while physically present in California, rejected his argument that presence based jurisdiction requires service directly on his person, confirmed the award, and entered judgment against him. Liu appealed.

The Question for Determination

In plain terms: if someone has been living in a US state for years, can a court there hear a case against them just because of that presence, or must the person delivering the lawsuit papers also place them directly in the defendant’s hands rather than use another accepted method of delivery?

Framed precisely, the appeal presented two questions. First, whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause conditions presence based general personal jurisdiction on service of process being made directly on the defendant’s person, as opposed to other means reasonably calculated to give actual notice. Second, whether a defendant who raised only a Rule 12(b)(2) personal jurisdiction defense in the district court also preserved a distinct Rule 12(b)(5) defense that the substitute service used did not strictly or substantially comply with governing service statutes.

The Court’s Reasoning

Reviewing the denial of Liu’s motion de novo, the panel first separated two defenses Liu’s briefing had blurred together: a challenge to the court’s power over him at all, under Rule 12(b)(2), and a challenge to how notice was delivered, under Rule 12(b)(5). Citing its own precedent, the panel stressed that these are independent defenses that must each be raised separately or they are waived. Because the Investment Center’s claims did not relate to Liu’s California contacts, only general, all purpose jurisdiction could apply, and general jurisdiction can rest on consent, domicile, or physical presence. Since Liu had not consented and the district court never decided his domicile, presence was the only live basis for jurisdiction.

On presence based jurisdiction, the panel turned to Burnham v. Superior Court, the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision recognizing that physical presence in a state, standing alone, has long supported general jurisdiction over an individual, tracing back to the English and early American practice of haling into court anyone found within a sovereign’s territory. Liu argued that this tradition specifically requires in-hand service on the defendant himself. The panel rejected that reading of the historical record. Working through the same authorities the Burnham plurality relied on, including Justice Story’s opinion in Picquet v. Swan and the Restatement (First) of Conflict of Laws, the panel found that “personal service” in this line of cases has always encompassed leaving papers at a defendant’s usual abode or with another person there, not only handing them over directly. Justice Brennan’s separate Burnham concurrence, which asks whether presence based jurisdiction is fair under contemporary due process values rather than history alone, pointed the same way: Liu had lived in California voluntarily for years, drawing on its laws and services, which made it the least burdensome forum available to him.

Liu’s fallback argument was that, even without in-hand service, due process requires strict or at least substantial compliance with the specific substitute service procedures set out in federal and California statutes. The panel rejected any constitutional overlay of that kind, holding that the Supreme Court has tied due process, for service of process, only to whether notice was reasonably calculated to reach the defendant and did reach him, not to technical compliance with a particular statute’s mechanics. Whether Liu’s specific method of service, left with a cotenant, mailed, and emailed, complied with California’s own service rules was, in the panel’s view, a question for Rule 12(b)(5), not Rule 12(b)(2).

That distinction proved dispositive. Because Liu’s motion to dismiss cited only Rule 12(b)(2) and never mentioned insufficient service or Rule 12(b)(5), the panel held he had waived any argument about the mechanics of how service was carried out, including his later reliance on California case law about substitute service. As an alternative and independent ground, the panel added that even if the issue had been preserved, Liu offered no reason the constitutional minimum, actual notice reasonably achieved, was not met here, since he admitted receiving notice of the suit.

With both grounds for dismissal rejected, the panel affirmed confirmation of the arbitral award and the judgment against Liu in full.

Critical Assessment

The panel’s core holding, that presence based jurisdiction does not require in-hand service, rests on a careful and well sourced reading of the historical materials Burnham itself relied on. Rather than simply asserting that alternative service is fine, the opinion works through the specific cases the Burnham plurality cited, showing that even in the eighteenth and nineteenth century authorities, personal service already included substitute delivery at a defendant’s residence. That is a genuinely persuasive answer to Liu’s argument, and it forecloses a rule under which a defendant could defeat jurisdiction simply by declining to open the door.

The opinion’s separate treatment of the Rule 12(b)(2) and 12(b)(5) defenses does real work for the outcome, and that procedural distinction is less obvious to a layperson, or even to counsel unfamiliar with the doctrine, than it might first appear. Liu’s motion to dismiss did challenge the propriety of how he was served, even if it framed that challenge as going to personal jurisdiction rather than citing Rule 12(b)(5) by name. Requiring a defendant to sort his objections into the correct procedural box at the first opportunity, on pain of losing the argument permanently, places heavy weight on precise pleading early in a case, a trap that lands hardest on parties without sophisticated litigation counsel from the outset.

The decision also carries practical value beyond its own facts. It confirms that a party enforcing a foreign arbitral award under the New York Convention need not track down a defendant for in-hand service if that defendant is otherwise reachable and physically resident in the forum, which matters to cross-border creditors chasing debtors who relocate to the United States after losing an arbitration elsewhere. The court did not need to, and did not, address whether the underlying award should be confirmed on the merits. The entire appeal turned on this threshold jurisdictional question, leaving the substantive Convention defenses to enforcement untouched, and a reader focused on award enforcement generally should not read this opinion as broadening or narrowing those separate grounds.

Implications

If you’re not a lawyer: If you move to and live in a US state, its courts can generally hear a case against you based on that residence alone, even for a dispute entirely unconnected to that state, and even if you were served through the mail, by email, or by leaving papers with someone at your home rather than a process server placing them directly in your hands. Living somewhere carries legal consequences: it makes you answerable to that place’s courts. If you plan to challenge how you were sued, get advice quickly and raise every available objection together, since a court can treat an objection you do not raise early as permanently given up, even one that might otherwise have succeeded.

For the profession: Counsel defending a client against suit grounded in presence based jurisdiction should not conflate a Rule 12(b)(2) personal jurisdiction defense with a Rule 12(b)(5) insufficient service defense. Both must be separately pleaded in the initial motion to dismiss under Rule 12(g) and 12(h), and this panel confirms the Ninth Circuit will treat an unraised Rule 12(b)(5) argument as waived even where the underlying facts about service were squarely before the district court on the jurisdictional motion. For creditors enforcing foreign arbitral awards or foreign judgments against individuals who have relocated to the United States, this opinion is useful authority that substitute service on a physically present defendant, reasonably calculated to provide actual notice, satisfies due process without more, easing the threshold burden of establishing personal jurisdiction in confirmation proceedings under FAA Chapter 2.