Article by David S. Welkowitz
This Article will address the various problems emanating from extraterritorial injunctions, focusing on state regulation and protection of trademarks. The goal is modest: to examine the limits of a state's power to issue an injunction that operates extraterritorially as a remedy in trademark cases. It is the thesis of this Article that there are constitutional limitations on the power of a state to regulate activity in other states, and that injunctions like the one issued in Mead exceed those limits. Part I of the Article presents some background about the particular state trademark laws at issue in Mead and provides some additional discussion of the Mead case. The Parts that follow discuss the issues of state power, both in terms of preemption by federal statutes and of limits found directly in the Constitution: Part II discusses the possibility that state antidilution laws are preempted by the federal trademark statute (and concludes that they are not preempted); Part III provides an introduction to the constitutional limits on extraterritorial injunctions, comparing various examples of multistate torts with the extraterritorial effect of antidilution laws; Part IV discusses several lines of Supreme Court cases that indicate a general concern of the Court with extraterritorial regulation; and Part V formulates a principle limiting extraterritorial injunctions and applies it to antidilution laws.
About the Author
David S. Welkowitz. Professor of Law, Whittier College School of Law. A.B., Princeton University, 1975; J.D., New York University, 1978.
Citation
67 Tul. L. Rev. 1 (1992)