Published
May 11, 2026
This article is part of a series: The Declaration of Independence: Principles We Defend
When the American colonists broke from Britain, they weren’t just rejecting a king. They were rejecting the idea that a distant government — one they didn’t choose and couldn’t influence — could reach across an ocean and dictate how they lived. That principle didn’t expire in 1776. It’s woven into America’s constitutional structure. And it’s under increasing pressure.
One of the colonists’ most pointed grievances against King George III was that he and Parliament together asserted sweeping extraterritorial legislative jurisdiction over the colonies, overriding the local self-government guaranteed by their charters.
“He has combined with [Parliament] to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws,” the Declaration of Independence protests, by (among other things) “declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.”
That language targets a specific British law: the Declaratory Act of 1766, which brazenly claimed Parliament’s “full power and authority . . . to bind the colonies and people of America . . . in all cases whatsoever.”
The colonists rejected this power grab as both politically illegitimate and flatly illegal. In 1775, the Second Continental Congress condemned the Declaratory Act’s “enormous” and “unlimited” claimed power as tyrannical because “[n]ot a single man of those who assume it, is chosen by us; or is subject to our control or influence.” John Adams denounced such purported authority as “an affront” to Americans because “there is not an acre of American land represented . . . in parliament.” Thomas Jefferson accordingly concluded in 1774 that the colonies remained “exempt . . . from the jurisdiction of the British parliament,” which “has no right to exercise authority over us.”
But Parliament’s extraterritorial regulation of the colonies without political representation was not merely undemocratic. It was also unlawful. It was “repugnant to the essential maxims of jurisprudence,” James Wilson argued, for the colonies to “be bound by the legislative authority of the parliament of Great Britain.”
The Declaration of Independence: Principles We Defend. In this series, we take individual grievances from the Declaration and highlight the amicus briefs and regulatory lawsuits filed by the Chamber Litigation Center to advance that founding value.
These weren’t mere abstract philosophical complaints. They were assertions of a bedrock legal principle: no sovereign may impose its laws beyond its own borders on people who have no voice in its government. That principle didn’t just fuel the American Revolution. It became our constitutional law.
The U.S. Constitution’s system of federalism embeds these same territorial limits, restricting each state’s authority to its own jurisdiction. As the Supreme Court explained in New York Life Insurance Co. v. Head, 234 U.S. 149 (1914), the principle that one state’s laws may not “operate beyond the jurisdiction of that State . . . lies at the foundation” of numerous constitutional provisions and “is so obviously the necessary result of the Constitution that it has rarely been called in question.” Id. at 161–62. Yet in recent decades, states have increasingly tested those boundaries — pushing their regulatory reach well beyond their own borders.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Litigation Center fights back against that overreach on multiple fronts. We have long fought states’ attempts to assert sweeping judicial jurisdiction over defendants and claims with little or no local connection. We have filed briefs for decades in pathbreaking personal jurisdiction cases like Goodyear v. Brown, J. McIntyre Machinery v. Nicastro, and DaimlerChrysler v. Bauman, which all rejected broad theories for exercising judicial authority over out-of-state enterprises.
We have also carried on the fight against states’ legislating beyond their borders. For example, in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, 598 U.S. 356 (2023), we recently urged the Supreme Court to reaffirm the bedrock constitutional principle that states may regulate only activities within their own jurisdiction. Although the Court upheld the particular state law at issue, it agreed that states must respect the territorial limits on their power under the “original and historical understandings of the Constitution’s structure and the principles of sovereignty and comity it embraces.” Id. at 376 (internal quotation marks omitted). And we intend to enforce those limits.
We have opposed state attempts to regulate out-of-state fuel extraction and prescription-drug sales. We have challenged efforts by plaintiffs’ attorneys to have one state’s law govern entire nationwide class actions — regulating conduct with no connection to that state. And we have pushed back against states seeking to impose punitive damages for conduct that occurred entirely outside their borders.
These fights against state extraterritorial overreach are far from over. The Litigation Center is currently litigating affirmative lawsuits challenging state attempts to imposeliability for (and otherwise regulate) out-of-state and global greenhouse-gas emissions and to levy punitive taxes based on businesses’ activity in other states. These cases test the same fundamental question the colonists confronted 250 years ago: whether one government can reach beyond its borders to control conduct it has no legitimate authority to regulate.
The Founders answered that question in 1776—with a resounding “no.” The Litigation Center defends that answer every day.
About the authors
Daryl Joseffer
Daryl Joseffer is president at the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, the litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A former principal deputy solicitor general, Joseffer has argued 12 cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and briefed many more. He has argued dozens of appeals in other courts across the country.
Jonathan Urick
Jonathan Urick is senior associate chief counsel at the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, the litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Urick handles a variety of litigation matters for the Chamber.
