Carter Page , an individual v. Democratic National Committee , an unincorporated asso- ciation

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 20-2781
C ARTER P AGE , an individual, et al.,
Plaintiffs-Appellants,
v.
D EMOCRATIC NATIONAL C OMMITTEE , an unincorporated asso-
ciation, et al.,
Defendants-Appellees.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 1:20-cv-671 — Harry D. Leinenweber, Judge.
____________________
A RGUED A PRIL 21, 2021 — D ECIDED J UNE 21, 2021
____________________
Before S CUDDER , ST . EVE , and KIRSCH , Circuit Judges.
SCUDDER , Circuit Judge. Carter Page, a former advisor to
the Donald J. Trump Presidential Campaign, filed suit against
the Democratic National Committee, a subsidiary DNC Ser-
vices Corporation, the law firm Perkins Coie LLP, and two
Perkins Coie partners. Page alleges various acts of defamation
based on news stories published in the fall of 2016. Having
advanced only violations of state law, and further alleging

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2 No. 20-2781
that no defendant is a citizen of his home state of Oklahoma,
Page relies on diversity jurisdiction as his gateway into fed-
eral court.
The district court dismissed the case for lack of personal
jurisdiction. Upon reviewing Page’s notice of appeal and ac-
companying docketing statement, we questioned the exist-
ence of subject matter jurisdiction on the basis that Perkins
Coie (with a few of its U.S. based partners working and living
abroad) may not qualify as a proper defendant for purposes
of diversity jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332. Our concern
proved accurate. So, while we have no reason to question the
district court’s conclusion on personal jurisdiction, we affirm
the dismissal of Page’s complaint for lack of subject matter ju-
risdiction.
I
Carter Page served as a foreign policy advisor to former
President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. In his complaint,
Page alleged that Perkins Coie and the DNC retained a com-
pany called Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on
then-candidate Trump. Fusion GPS, the complaint continued,
engaged the services of Christopher Steele, who drafted vari-
ous memoranda including two that mentioned meetings dur-
ing the campaign between Page and Russian officials.
Page also alleged that Perkins Coie facilitated meetings be-
tween Fusion GPS and news outlets that ultimately led to the
publication of stories reporting these allegations of contacts
between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Specifi-
cally, Page’s complaint identified a Yahoo! News article from
September 23, 2016 reporting on the supposed meetings with

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No. 20-2781 3
Russian officials. Page reacted by suing Perkins Coie, the
DNC, and the individual defendants for defamation.
Page initially filed a pro se complaint in the Western Dis-
trict of Oklahoma, his state of residence. After the district
court dismissed the claim for lack of personal jurisdiction,
Page refiled his suit in the Northern District of Illinois with
the assistance of retained counsel.
The district court in Illinois likewise dismissed all claims
for lack of personal jurisdiction. The district court concluded
that the complaint did not allege facts sufficient to establish
specific or general jurisdiction in Illinois. Page’s complaint,
the district court explained, recounted only actions performed
outside of Illinois by persons from other states, with no ac-
companying allegation that the defendants targeted Illinois
with the allegedly defamatory news story.
Page appeals and, in an attempt to establish closer ties to
Illinois, now reframes his allegations as centering on the role
of Perkins Coie’s general counsel, Matthew Gehringer, who
works out of the firm’s Chicago office. Though we see few
facts in the complaint supporting these alleged contacts with
Illinois, we find ourselves confronted with a more fundamen-
tal issue—whether this case belongs in any federal court at all.
Our review of the citizenship of the parties involved
leaves us of the firm conviction that we lack subject matter ju-
risdiction. We therefore affirm the district court’s dismissal of
Page’s complaint.

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4 No. 20-2781
II
A
Article III of the Constitution extends the “judicial Power”
to nine specified categories of Cases and Controversies, in-
cluding Controversies “between Citizens of different States.”
But constitutional authorization, while necessary, is not suffi-
cient to empower a federal court to resolve a Controversy be-
tween citizens of different states. Congressional authorization
also must exist. See Sheldon v. Sill, 49 U.S. (8 How.) 441, 448–
49 (1850) (explaining that Congress’s authority to create the
lower federal courts brings with it the discretion to confer ju-
risdiction less than that allowed by Article III). Congress first
authorized diversity jurisdiction in the Judiciary Act of 1789.
Today’s diversity jurisdiction statute finds its home in
28 U.S.C. § 1332. The enactment establishes federal jurisdic-
tion over “all civil actions where the matter in controversy ex-
ceeds” $75,000 and, as relevant here, if the action is between
“citizens of different States” or “citizens of a State and citizens
or subjects of a foreign state.” 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a).
The party invoking diversity jurisdiction (most often the
plaintiff) bears the burden of showing its existence. See Hertz
Corp. v. Friend, 559 U.S. 77, 96 (2010). And, as the Supreme
Court has long instructed, federal courts, as courts of limited
jurisdiction, must make their own inquiry to ensure that all
statutory requirements are met before exercising jurisdiction.
See Great Southern Fire Proof Hotel Co. v. Jones, 177 U.S. 449, 453
(1900) (“On every writ of error or appeal, the first and funda-
mental question is that of jurisdiction, first, of this court, and
then of the court from which the record comes. This question
the court is bound to ask and answer for itself, even when not

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No. 20-2781 5
otherwise suggested, and without respect to the relation of
the parties to it.”).
With diversity jurisdiction, the proper inquiry must ac-
count for each statutory requirement:
Amount in Controversy. The statutory implementation of
diversity jurisdiction has always been tied to a minimum dol-
lar amount at issue in the underlying dispute—the idea being
that the federal courts should not become an interstate small
claims court. See R. Marcus et al., Civil Procedure a Modern Ap-
proach 878 (2d ed. 2018). The Judiciary Act of 1789 set that
amount at $500. See Section 11, 1 Stat. 73, 78. Today it is
$75,000. The plaintiff must allege that the controversy entails
a dispute over more than $75,000, exclusive of interests and
costs. See 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a). The burden of doing so is not
heavy and dismissal is warranted only if it “appear[s] to a le-
gal certainty that the claim is really for less than the jurisdic-
tional amount to justify dismissal.” Saint Paul Mercury Indem.
Co., v. Red Cab Co., 303 U.S. 283, 289 (1938).
Page’s complaint does not specify the amount of damages
he seeks, but he does more generally advance a good-faith re-
quest for more than the $75,000 jurisdictional minimum.
Given the nature of the allegations, and the types of monetary
damages implicated by the complaint, we have no reason to
question the sufficiency of his pleading as to the amount in
controversy. See id. at 288 (“[U]nless the law gives a different
rule, the sum claimed by the plaintiff controls if the claim is
apparently made in good faith.” (footnote omitted)).
Determining Citizenship. By the terms of § 1332(a), Con-
gress also hinged the existence of diversity jurisdiction on the

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6 No. 20-2781
“citizenship” of the parties involved. The inquiry here can be
complex depending on the parties to the dispute.
Starting on the simpler side, it has long been established
that natural persons are typically a citizen of the state in
which they reside or—to be more precise—are “domiciled.”
See Gilbert v. David, 235 U.S. 561, 569 (1915); see also 13E
Charles Alan Wright & Arthur R. Miller, Federal Practice and
Procedure § 3612 (3d ed. 2021) (explaining with great clarity
how federal courts determine a person’s domicile for pur-
poses of jurisdictional citizenship); Erwin Chemerinsky, Fed-
eral Jurisdiction § 5.3.3 (7th ed. 2016) (providing another excel-
lent overview of how courts determine the citizenship of the
parties as part of assessing diversity jurisdiction). An individ-
ual can have only one domicile at a time. See Williamson v.
Osenton, 232 U.S. 619, 625 (1914).
When it comes to corporations, however, the diversity
statute itself makes clear that a corporation is a citizen of both
its state of incorporation and the state in which it maintains
its “principal place of business.” See 28 U.S.C. § 1332(c)(1).
The Supreme Court has determined that a corporation’s prin-
cipal place of business is the same as its “nerve center,” or “the
place where the corporation’s high level officers direct, con-
trol, and coordinate the corporation’s activities.” Hertz Corp.,
559 U.S. at 80.
Determining the citizenship of other forms of business as-
sociations is often more difficult. Partnerships, for example,
are citizens of every state in which an individual partner is a
citizen. See Carden v. Arkoma Assocs., 494 U.S. 185, 195 (1990).
The same rule applies to other unincorporated entities, like
limited liability companies, whose citizenship is also deter-
mined by the citizenship of its “members.” See Americold

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No. 20-2781 7
Realty Trust v. Conagra Foods, Inc., 577 U.S. 378, 381–82 (2016).
Think about the size of many of today’s partnerships, whether
law firms, accounting firms, consulting firms, and so on. It is
often no easy task for a plaintiff to discern the domicile (and,
by extension, citizenship) of each partner or member. See Hart
v. Terminex Int’l, 336 F.3d 541, 543 (7th Cir. 2003) (observing
that tracing the citizenship of unincorporated associations
“may create some extra work for the diligent litigant, and for
those with less diligence the limited partnership has become
a notorious source of jurisdictional complications” (internal
quotation marks omitted)).
Add another layer of complexity. Some individuals or en-
tities are not considered to be citizens of any state. Recall that
the diversity statute creates jurisdiction only over suits be-
tween citizens of different states, citizens of a state and a for-
eign citizen, or foreign citizens living in the United States. See
28 U.S.C. § 1332(a). The Supreme Court has interpreted this
statutory list to exclude United States citizens who are domi-
ciled abroad. See Newman-Green, Inc. v. Alfonzo-Larrain,
490 U.S. 826, 828–29 (1989). Such individuals are not “citi-
zens” of any state for purposes of the statute because they are
not domiciled in a state. They are, in a word, “stateless.” See
id. at 828. Nor, of course, would United States citizens living
in another nation fall within the statute’s understanding of
“foreign citizens.” It takes more than living abroad to be a cit-
izen of the foreign nation.
Adhering to the Supreme Court’s instruction in Newman-
Green, we have consistently held that United States citizens
domiciled abroad cannot be sued in diversity. See, e.g., Win-
forge, Inc. v. Coachmen Indus., Inc., 691 F.3d 856, 867 (7th Cir.
2012) (“[A] United States citizen who establishes domicile in

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8 No. 20-2781
a foreign country is no longer a citizen of any State of the
United States and destroys complete diversity under
28 U.S.C. § 1332.”); Kamel v. Hill-Rom Co., 108 F.3d 799, 805
(7th Cir. 1997) (same); Sadat v. Mertes, 615 F.2d 1176, 1180,
1182 (7th Cir. 1980) (pre-Newman-Green case reaching the
same conclusion). Federal courts, then, lack jurisdiction over
these so-called “stateless” citizens if the only basis for subject
matter jurisdiction is the diversity statute. See Newman-Green,
490 U.S. at 828–29.
The Complete Diversity Requirement. For well over 200 years,
the Supreme Court has interpreted statutory diversity juris-
diction to require “complete diversity” between the parties.
See Strawbridge v. Curtiss, 7 U.S. (3 Cranch) 267, 267 (1806).
Usually this means that a federal court must satisfy itself that
no party on the plaintiff’s side of the suit shares citizenship
with any party on the defendant’s side. See Wis. Dep’t of Corr.
v. Schacht, 524 U.S. 381, 388 (1998) (“A case falls within the fed-
eral district court’s ‘original’ diversity ‘jurisdiction’ only if di-
versity of citizenship among the parties is complete, i.e., only
if there is no plaintiff and no defendant who are citizens of the
same State.”). With limited exceptions for class action suits
not relevant here, shared citizenship between just one party
on both sides of the lawsuit destroys complete diversity. See
id.
Though complete diversity typically hinges on whether
any parties on both sides of a lawsuit share citizenship, there
is another nuanced and sometimes overlooked component to
the inquiry: all parties must fall within the jurisdiction created
by the diversity statute. Put another way, if a party cannot sue
or be sued under one of the provisions of the diversity statute,
the suit lacks complete diversity. See Kamel, 108 F.3d at 805

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No. 20-2781 9
(“When a plaintiff sues multiple defendants in a diversity ac-
tion, complete diversity must be present. That is, the plaintiff
must satisfy the diversity requirements for each defendant or
else encounter dismissal.” (citing Newman-Green, 490 U.S. at
829)). What this means here is that stateless citizens—because
they are not (by definition) a citizen of a state, as § 1332(a) re-
quires—destroy complete diversity just as much as a defend-
ant who shares citizenship with a plaintiff.
All of this background brings us to the question presented:
whether a partnership—here the law firm Perkins Coie—
made up of at least one, individual “stateless citizen” partner
can be sued in diversity. We conclude that it cannot.
B
All agree that the only alleged basis for federal jurisdiction
in this case is the diversity statute. And nobody questions
whether the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000. So the
question of our subject matter jurisdiction depends on the
presence, or absence, of complete diversity.
Carter Page is a citizen of Oklahoma. The two LLC plain-
tiffs—Global Energy LLC and Global Natural Gas LLC—are
based in Oklahoma and Page, a citizen of Oklahoma, is the
only member. This means the LLC plaintiffs are also citizens
of Oklahoma.
The Democratic National Committee is registered as a
nonprofit corporation under the name “DNC Services
Corp./Dem. Nat’l Committee.” It is a citizen of Washington,
D.C., where it is incorporated and maintains its headquarters.
Perkins Coie is a limited liability partnership and so its citi-
zenship depends on the citizenship of each individual part-
ner. None of Perkins Coie’s partners, including the two

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10 No. 20-2781
named defendants, Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann, is a cit-
izen of Oklahoma.
So far, so good. If our analysis could stop there, we would
conclude there is complete diversity. But we need to go a step
further. In response to our concerns regarding subject matter
jurisdiction, Perkins Coie submitted affidavits from three in-
dividual partners who are U.S. citizens domiciled in China:
Yun (Louise) Lu, Scott Palmer, and James M. Zimmerman.
And, for his part, Page, in his amended jurisdictional state-
ment, identified these three individuals (along with several
others) as living in either Shanghai or Beijing, China.
The question, then, is whether the stateless status of these
individual partners must be attributed to Perkins Coie, ren-
dering the partnership itself (as a named defendant) stateless
and thereby destroying complete diversity and our authority
to hear this case.
III
A
The Supreme Court has not explicitly answered this ques-
tion. But the Court has held both that a stateless citizen cannot
be sued in diversity (see Newman-Green, 490 U.S. at 828–29)
and that the citizenship of a partnership is based on the citi-
zenship of each individual partner (see Carden, 494 U.S. at
195–96). Whether reading these two rules together requires
finding that a partnership composed of at least one stateless
citizen is itself stateless—a concept we refer to as attribution
of statelessness—remains unresolved by the Court.
To be sure, the Court seemed to get close to answering the
question (albeit in dicta) in Lincoln Prop. Co. v. Roche, 546 U.S.
81 (2005). In the course of holding that a diverse defendant

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No. 20-2781 11
could remove a case to federal court, the Court summarized
Carden by observing that “for diversity purposes, a partner-
ship entity, unlike a corporation, does not rank as a citizen; to
meet the complete diversity requirement, all partners, limited
as well as general must be diverse from all parties on the oppos-
ing side.” Id. at 84 n.1 (emphasis added). It is possible to read
this language as requiring all partners to be suable in diver-
sity—in other words, that no partner be a stateless citizen. In
time the Court is sure to confront the question more squarely.
Our court, too, has seemed to come close to saying that an
individual partner’s stateless status makes the partnership it-
self stateless. Indeed, we have assumed this to be true in at
least one prior case. See ISI Int’l, Inc. v. Borden Ladner Gervais
LLP, 316 F.3d 731, 733 (7th Cir. 2003) (“One of Scott & Aylen’s
partners is a U.S. citizen domiciled in Canada; she has no state
citizenship, so the diversity jurisdiction is unavailable.”). But
we have never squarely resolved the issue when it was out-
come determinative. Doing so now, we hold that a partner-
ship made up of at least one stateless citizen is itself stateless
and cannot be sued in diversity.
Every other circuit to have confronted the question has
reached the same conclusion. See D.B. Zwirn Special Opportu-
nities Fund, L.P. v. Mehrotra, 661 F.3d 124, 127 (1st Cir. 2011)
(“Therefore, if even one of Zwirn’s members is another unin-
corporated association, and if that association has one mem-
ber or partner that is either a stateless person or an entity
treated like a stateless person, we would not have diversity
jurisdiction over this matter.”); Herrick Co. v. SCS Commc’ns,
Inc., 251 F.3d 315, 322 (2d Cir. 2001) (“[I]f Skadden has among
its partners any U.S. citizens who are domiciled abroad, then
Skadden and Herrick (which is a citizen of Florida) are non-

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12 No. 20-2781
diverse.”); Swiger v. Allegheny Energy, Inc., 540 F.3d 179, 184–
85 (3d Cir. 2008) (“Because Morgan Lewis has a stateless part-
ner, and thus, all partners of Morgan Lewis are not diverse
from all parties on the opposing side, the district court cor-
rectly held that it lacked diversity jurisdiction over this ac-
tion.”); Firefighters’ Ret. Sys. v. Citco Grp. Ltd., 796 F.3d 520, 523
n.1 (5th Cir. 2015) (“[T]he addition of Skadden defeated diver-
sity jurisdiction because Skadden, a partnership whose mem-
bers include U.S. citizens domiciled abroad, is stateless for the
purposes of diversity jurisdiction.” (citations omitted)).
We find the Third Circuit’s reasoning in Swiger most per-
suasive. In Swiger, the district court dismissed the case for lack
of diversity jurisdiction because one defendant, the law firm
Morgan Lewis, had at least one individual partner who was a
U.S. citizen domiciled in the United Kingdom. See 540 F.3d at
181. In affirming the dismissal, the Third Circuit recognized
the principles underpinning Newman-Green and Carden and
synthesized them to mean that partnerships cannot be sued
in diversity if any individual partner could not either. See id.
at 184. The court emphasized that the partnership as an entity
(and the named defendant) has no citizenship. See id. at 185.
Thus, the only way to determine citizenship for diversity pur-
poses is to look at the individual partners—an analytical path
repeatedly endorsed by the Supreme Court. See, e.g., Lincoln
Prop. Co., 546 U.S. 81; Carden, 494 U.S. 185.
The Third Circuit put the punchline this way: because cit-
izenship exists only through the citizenship of the partners,
any single “non-diverse” partner destroys diversity. See
Swiger, 540 F.3d at 185. And because a “stateless” citizen can-
not sue or be sued in diversity—they are “non-diverse”—a
single stateless partner destroys diversity just as much as

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No. 20-2781 13
would a partner residing in the same state as a plaintiff. See
id.
We adhere to this same reasoning and conclude that Per-
kins Coie (as a named defendant) takes on the stateless status
of its individual partners Lu, Palmer, and Zimmerman. This
attribution of statelessness destroys complete diversity and
deprived the district court of the power to hear this case.
We also reject Page’s claim, advanced for the first time in
two sentences in his reply brief in our court, that jurisdictional
discovery is needed to establish facts related to Perkins Coie’s
citizenship. Page waived this argument by failing to develop
it in any meaningful way. Indeed, Page cites no authority sup-
porting his cursory request. See Shipley v. Chicago Bd. of Elec-
tion Commissioners, 947 F.3d 1056, 1063 (7th Cir. 2020). (“Argu-
ments that are underdeveloped, cursory, and lack supporting
authority are waived.”) Nor did Page (until oral argument)
question the authenticity or sufficiency of the affidavits sub-
mitted by Perkins Coie establishing the citizenship or domi-
cile of Lu, Palmer, and Zimmerman. We have no independent
reason to doubt the veracity of these sworn statements. Page
waived his contrary contention, and we deny his request for
jurisdictional discovery on the point.
B
We acknowledge that in today’s global business environ-
ment, where multinational entities exist in every facet of com-
merce, this result may strike some as impractical. But keep in
mind that when Congress enacted the Judiciary Act of 1789,
and in the subsequent decades when the Supreme Court de-
cided many of its significant diversity jurisdiction cases, most
of today’s business forms did not exist. And those that did,

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14 No. 20-2781
like the corporation, depended entirely on the State for their
very existence. It is hardly surprising then that application of
this lengthy body of law to the interpretation of a statute
which traces its own origins back to our nation’s infancy leads
to limitations on our own jurisdiction. See Swiger, 540 F.3d at
186 (McKee, J., concurring in the judgment) (offering the same
observations).
Right to it, Page makes worthy policy arguments. Perhaps
instead of attributing a partner’s statelessness to the partner-
ship, the better approach would be to simply consider state-
less partners as a nullity. Instead, we could look only to the
citizenship of individual partners who have state citizenship
for purposes of the diversity statute.
But diversity jurisdiction is implemented by statute, and
on that point the language enacted into law by Congress and
then interpreted by the Supreme Court controls our decision.
In our view, § 1332, by its terms, requires that each individual
partner be subject to diversity jurisdiction. If this outcome
seems to defy modern commercial realities, the responsibility
for amending § 1332—updating it to account for today’s
forms of business associations—rests with Congress. The Su-
preme Court made this precise point in Carden, explaining
that “[s]uch accommodation is not only performed more le-
gitimately by Congress than by courts, but it is performed
more intelligently by legislation than by interpretation of the
statutory word ‘citizen.’” 494 U.S. at 197.
We therefore limit our holding to the result we conclude is
compelled by § 1332 in its present form.

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No. 20-2781 15
IV
We close by acknowledging that the district court acted
within its discretion in addressing questions of personal juris-
diction without first ensuring itself of its own subject matter
jurisdiction. See Ruhrgas AG v. Marathon Oil Co., 526 U.S. 574,
588 (1999) (explaining that where “a district court has before
it a straightforward personal jurisdiction issue presenting no
complex question of state law, and the alleged defect in sub-
ject-matter jurisdiction raises a difficult and novel question,
the court does not abuse its discretion by turning directly to
personal jurisdiction”). We, however, have chosen to chart a
different course, finding it important to clarify the attribution
of statelessness question presented by the facts of this case.
Having taken this route and determined that we lack sub-
ject matter jurisdiction, we cannot now reach the question of
personal jurisdiction. See Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Env’t,
523 U.S. 83, 94 (1998) (“Without jurisdiction the court cannot
proceed at all in any cause. Jurisdiction is power to declare the
law, and when it ceases to exist, the only function remaining
to the court is that of announcing the fact and dismissing the
cause.” (quoting Ex parte McCardle, 74 U.S. (7 Wall.) 506, 514
(1868)).
We also are cognizant of the fact that a dismissal for lack
of subject matter jurisdiction cannot be with prejudice. See
MAO-MSO Recovery II, LLC v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co.,
935 F.3d 573, 581–82 (7th Cir. 2019). We, therefore, AFFIRM
the district court’s dismissal, but modify the judgment to re-
flect a dismissal without prejudice.

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