Helms-Burton at the Jurisdictional Limit

In 1961, the Cuban government seized the cigarette company Ramón Rodriguez e Hijos, Sociedad en Comandita—“Rodriguez and Sons”—along with its factory and the mixed-use building beside it. The buildings remained in place and continued to be used, but the Rodriguez family lost ownership and control.

Sixty-five years later, the descendants of Ramón Rodriguez Gutiérrez traced how other companies allegedly used and profited from the property. They connected the factory to a Cuban cigar company, an indirect ownership interest to a British tobacco conglomerate, and the promotion of products associated with the property to a global advertising group and its American subsidiaries. That advertising, they alleged, traveled through Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, American websites, internet domains, and other services based in the United States.

Congress had written a cause of action for exactly this kind of injury. The descendants had become United States nationals and identified companies they said used, promoted, or profited from the property. They still had to show why an American court could exercise authority over two British defendants.

That jurisdictional question is the center of Rodriguez v. Imperial Brands. The Eleventh Circuit did not decide whether the Rodriguez heirs owned an enforceable claim, whether the British companies had “trafficked” in confiscated property, or whether the complaint otherwise stated a violation of the Helms-Burton Act. The court stopped before reaching liability and applied a proposition older than the statute and harder to legislate around: a federal law may define a wrong without giving a federal court power over every person who might have committed it. Judge Kevin Newsom, writing for the panel, held that the case could not proceed against the two British companies because the court lacked personal jurisdiction over them.

The building that stayed

The seven plaintiffs allege that they own a 90 percent interest in the confiscated Cuban company. According to their complaint, Habanos — a Cuban corporation controlled by the Cuban government — later used the factory to manufacture, market, and distribute cigars, while Cuba’s state tobacco monopoly kept offices in the neighboring building. The property remained in use, but the Rodriguezes no longer controlled it.

The ownership structure later extended beyond Cuba. Imperial Brands, incorporated and headquartered in the United Kingdom, acquired the Spanish company Altadis in 2007. Altadis held a 50 percent noncontrolling interest in Habanos, which left Imperial holding an interest in an interest — and it disposed of even that in 2020.

WPP had a more distant relationship to the factory but a closer connection to the alleged advertising in the United States. The complaint alleges that the British holding company and two of its United States subsidiaries helped market cigars produced, stored, or managed at the confiscated property. It ties that campaign to American digital infrastructure, including the platforms and domains used to distribute the advertising.

No one alleged that the cigars were sold in the United States; they could not lawfully be sold here. The American platforms were alleged only to have carried advertising toward markets abroad.

The property was in Havana, while the ownership and advertising relationships ran through Cuba, Spain, Britain, and the United States. The two defendants remaining on appeal were British, the plaintiffs were American, and the complaint alleged that American platforms carried the advertising. The heirs filed the lawsuit in Florida.

Helms-Burton allows American nationals to sue over commercial use of property confiscated in Cuba. Personal jurisdiction asks a separate question: what connection must a foreign defendant have to the United States before an American court can require it to defend the suit? Rodriguez turned on that distinction.

A statute with a long memory

Title III of the Helms-Burton Act gives a United States national who owns a claim to confiscated Cuban property a private action against a person who “traffics” in it. Congress made trafficking a deliberately capacious category: selling, leasing, managing, using, possessing, acquiring an interest in, or commercially benefiting from confiscated property, as well as participating in or profiting from another person’s trafficking.

The definition allows a claim to follow commercial use long after the original seizure. A factory may pass into state hands, enter a joint venture, produce goods, and support other businesses decades later. Title III allows the former owners or their successors to pursue companies that knowingly participate in or profit from that use.

For twenty-three years after Congress enacted the law in 1996, presidents repeatedly suspended the private right of action. Title III remained in the United States Code, but no plaintiff could use it. The Trump administration allowed the suspension to expire in May 2019, and the suits began to arrive.

By the summer of 2026, the Supreme Court had strengthened Title III in two separate decisions. In Havana Docks Corp. v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, the Court rejected the theory that liability depends on interference with the exact legal interest the plaintiff would still have possessed absent confiscation. The cruise lines had used physical docks in Havana after the plaintiff’s time-limited concession would otherwise have expired; no matter — the physical property itself could remain the relevant confiscated property, which the Court described as “tainted — off limits.” A month later, in Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Corporación CIMEX, the Court held that Cuban agencies and instrumentalities sued under Title III could not retreat into the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act merely because the plaintiff failed to fit within one of that statute’s ordinary exceptions. Helms-Burton’s own text made Congress’s displacement of immunity sufficiently clear.

Both decisions strengthened Title III claims. Rodriguez addressed the separate rules that determine whether an American court may exercise authority over a foreign company. The statute defined who could be liable, but it did not expressly authorize worldwide service of process or otherwise place every foreign company accused of trafficking within an American court’s jurisdiction.

The Two Jurisdictional Routes

Personal jurisdiction requires legal authorization for service of process and an exercise of judicial power consistent with due process.

The heirs relied on two federal routes under Rule 4. They did not argue that Florida or any other state could exercise jurisdiction over the British parent companies under the ordinary rule that borrows state-court authority.

The first, Rule 4(k)(1)(C), applies when a federal statute authorizes service. Helms-Burton does not expressly provide for nationwide or worldwide service of process, and nowhere does it declare that foreign defendants who satisfy Title III’s definition of trafficking are, by that fact, subject to personal jurisdiction in federal court. The plaintiffs pointed instead to Congress’s finding that the United States has an obligation to provide private remedies for wrongful foreign confiscations. The Eleventh Circuit treated that statement as an explanation of Congress’s purpose, not as authorization to serve foreign defendants anywhere in the world. Congress has expressly authorized nationwide or worldwide service in other laws and did not do so in Helms-Burton.

The second route was Rule 4(k)(2), the federal long-arm provision, which permits jurisdiction over a defendant facing a federal claim who is not subject to jurisdiction in any state’s courts, provided the exercise of federal power is consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States. WPP and Imperial did not argue that some individual state could exercise general jurisdiction over them, so the question moved directly to the Fifth Amendment.

For years, courts in the Eleventh Circuit would have answered it through minimum contacts. They treated the Fifth Amendment, which restrains the federal government, as carrying essentially the same personal-jurisdiction test the Fourteenth Amendment imposes on the states; the forum simply grew, contacts with the nation replacing contacts with a state. In 2025, the Supreme Court rejected that equivalence.

After minimum contacts

Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization concerned a federal statute that subjected the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority to jurisdiction in terrorism cases after specified conduct. The Supreme Court held that the Fifth Amendment does not mechanically incorporate the Fourteenth Amendment’s minimum-contacts standard.

The difference begins with sovereignty. The Fourteenth Amendment limits state power, and its jurisdictional doctrine reflects more than fairness to defendants: it polices the allocation of authority among coequal states, marking where one sovereign’s writ ends and a neighbor’s begins. The federal government has no such neighbors. It has nationwide and extraterritorial authority that no state possesses, so a rule designed partly to divide power among states did not transfer intact to the national government.

But Fuld removed the old test without supplying a complete replacement. The Court upheld the narrowly targeted statute before it and declined to define the “outer bounds” of federal adjudicative power. It suggested only that due process might require a reasonable exercise of jurisdiction, measured by the burden on the defendant, the sovereign’s interest in adjudication, and the plaintiff’s interest in relief. Rodriguez was among the first appellate cases to apply that inquiry after Fuld.

The Eleventh Circuit held, first, that Fuld governs Rule 4(k)(2), not only statutes that expressly authorize service. It then stated the break plainly: the Fifth Amendment no longer imposes a formal minimum-contacts requirement. That did not make geography irrelevant; it changed the form in which geography, notice, conduct, and sovereign interest enter a case. A defendant’s conduct, presence, notice, and burden still matter, but courts now consider them as part of a broader inquiry into whether exercising federal power over that defendant would be reasonable.

The breadth that weakened the claim

The plaintiffs had the strongest possible interest in a forum. They were United States nationals invoking a federal remedy that exists only in American courts; denied jurisdiction here, their claim against these defendants would not transfer to some other courthouse but simply end.

The United States had a genuine interest too. Congress enacted Title III to discourage commercial exploitation of confiscated property and to give American claimants a remedy. The Eleventh Circuit did not treat that interest as trivial — only as less concentrated than the interest in Fuld.

The statute in Fuld identified two specific foreign entities and the conduct that would subject them to American jurisdiction. It gave those defendants direct notice that particular acts would expose them to suit in the United States.

Helms-Burton speaks instead to “any person” who traffics in confiscated property, anywhere. Its substantive definition can reach a private company abroad even when the company’s own conduct has no necessary connection to the United States. The indifference to geography is deliberate: Congress wanted to deter foreign commerce in confiscated Cuban assets wherever that commerce occurred.

That breadth helped define liability but weakened the jurisdictional argument. A foreign company could fall within Title III’s trafficking definition without acting in the United States or receiving clear notice that its conduct would require it to defend a case here. The panel therefore looked for a more specific American connection: conduct in the United States, a relevant office or presence here, control over an American subsidiary, or statutory language clearly authorizing jurisdiction. It found too little for WPP and Imperial.

The Parent-Company Attribution Test

The heirs tried to connect WPP to the United States through its American subsidiaries — the agencies that allegedly carried the marketing campaign onto American websites and platforms. WPP itself was also described as keeping dual headquarters in London and New York.

Corporate affiliation alone does not ordinarily attribute one company’s acts to another, and the panel found the alter-ego showing inadequate. Consolidated financial reporting, shared officers, and centralized direction of treasury, tax, legal affairs, and internal audit are ordinary features of a multinational organization rather than proof that subsidiary separateness is fictional. The American conduct therefore remained the subsidiaries’ own. The New York office supplied no missing connection because the plaintiffs had abandoned general jurisdiction and the alleged trafficking arose elsewhere.

Imperial stood farther still from the American end of the chain. It had no alleged United States office and no relevant conduct of its own here. Its relationship to the factory ran through acquisition — Imperial bought Altadis, Altadis held a noncontrolling half-interest in Habanos, Habanos allegedly used the confiscated property — and Habanos answered to the Cuban government, not to Imperial. Even if WPP’s American subsidiaries performed work for Habanos, that did not plausibly make them Imperial’s agents.

The complaint described a commercial chain from the factory to Habanos, from Habanos to Altadis, and from Altadis to Imperial, as well as an advertising chain from WPP’s subsidiaries to the parent company. The panel held that those relationships did not allow the court to attribute each company’s conduct to the next one for jurisdictional purposes.

An order from two sovereigns

British law created another obstacle. The United Kingdom’s protection-of-trading-interests law targets specified extraterritorial sanctions, including Helms-Burton. It bars covered people and companies from complying with those measures, requires reports when protected interests are affected, permits recovery of resulting damages, and allows government authorization in exceptional cases. A violation can carry criminal consequences.

The practical bind was stark. An American court could require a British company to appear and defend; British law, as the Eleventh Circuit understood it, could require that company to obtain its own government’s authorization before doing so. To appear without London’s leave risked criminal exposure at home. Staying away risked a judgment entered in the company’s absence.

That conflict did not create automatic immunity, and the panel was careful to say so: a foreign legislature cannot narrow American jurisdiction merely by criminalizing compliance with it. The blocking law was one factor in the due-process analysis, not an automatic bar to American jurisdiction.

Its force came from everything around it. Helms-Burton contained no express worldwide-service provision and supplied no jurisdictional predicates; the parent companies had no alleged claim-related conduct of their own in the United States; alter ego and agency had failed; the relevant American presence was thin. Against that background, forcing the companies into a proceeding their home state forbade them to enter without permission looked constitutionally severe.

The panel treated British law as part of the Fifth Amendment’s fairness inquiry. Comity, often used to manage diplomatic concerns and discovery, now also informed whether American courts could fairly exercise power over these defendants.

What Courts Consider After Fuld

Rodriguez did not restore the old minimum-contacts test. The panel examined the defendants’ notice, their own conduct, and any claim-related presence in the United States. It also considered whether their subsidiaries’ acts could be attributed to them, the strength of the national interest, and the requirements of British law.

Without a fixed formula, courts must weigh notice, the defendant’s conduct and U.S. presence, corporate separateness, the national interest, and conflicting foreign law. Fuld freed federal jurisdiction from a doctrine shaped by interstate federalism while preserving the need to explain why this sovereign may command this defendant in this dispute.

The new approach is more flexible and less predictable. Congress can strengthen the case for jurisdiction by expressly authorizing service and identifying the conduct that triggers it. When Congress has not spoken clearly, courts must compare the United States’ interest in hearing the case with the burden imposed on the foreign defendant. Rodriguez is the Eleventh Circuit’s first substantial attempt to organize that analysis.

Congressional Authorization for Worldwide Service

The holding is narrower than some descriptions will suggest. The Eleventh Circuit left untouched the merits of WPP’s and Imperial’s compliance with Helms-Burton, the status of their alleged relationships with Habanos under the trafficking definition, and the magistrate judge’s alternative pleading analysis. It also created no categorical shelter for British or European corporations and left Rule 4(k)(2) available in cases involving different conduct or contacts. The panel held only that jurisdiction over these defendants, on these allegations, under this statutory scheme, was unreasonable.

Different facts could produce a different balance. A foreign company might conduct the alleged trafficking through its own American office, directly control the domestic entity performing the acts, receive explicit statutory notice, or operate free of a conflicting home-country prohibition. Congress, for its part, could amend Title III—authorizing worldwide service and identifying the conduct or relationships that trigger federal jurisdiction with words absent from the current text. Even then, the constitutional question would remain. Fuld preserved an outer limit without defining it, and Rodriguez located reasonableness inside that limit; an express service provision would solve the first problem in the case while leaving global fairness for separate analysis.

The summer’s Helms-Burton decisions addressed different questions. Havana Docks concerned what property Title III follows. Exxon Mobil concerned immunity for Cuban state entities. Rodriguez concerned whether an American court could exercise authority over two private British companies. A strong claim on the merits does not answer the separate jurisdictional question.

Congress aimed Title III at commerce in confiscated property wherever it occurred. In practice, however, the statute is easiest to enforce against defendants whose own conduct, offices, or controlled agents connect the claim to the United States. It is harder to enforce against foreign companies whose alleged role took place abroad and whose American subsidiaries acted independently.

The statute can recognize an injury tied to property confiscated decades ago and impose liability on companies that knowingly traffic in it. But alleging a Title III violation does not by itself give an American court personal jurisdiction over every foreign defendant.

The Rodriguez name appeared on the company Cuba seized in 1961 and on the lawsuit the heirs filed in 2026. The factory remained in use, produced goods, housed offices, and became part of later corporate arrangements. The heirs traced those commercial relationships from Havana to foreign companies and American advertising platforms. The Eleventh Circuit did not decide whether that history established a Helms-Burton violation. It held that the alleged connections were not enough to require WPP and Imperial to defend the case in an American court.