International Shoe Co. v. Washington

Hess established a fiction.  In Hess, the fiction was that driving in a state was equivalent to appointment of the Secretary of State as the driver's agent for service of process purposes.  But no one believed that a person driving in a jurisdiction other than their state of residence thereby intended to appoint anyone an agent. And if what SCOTUS was saying in Kane and Hess was that the driver's action of driving was enough, and that intentions were irrelevant, there was no need the concept of "appointing an agent." The supposed invocation of a "principal" appoint an "agent," an area of law to which scholars devote their entire lives (it has its own Restatements, for example), was doing no work.

The Supreme Court established counterpart fictions in other cases decided between Pennoyer and World War II.  For example, in some cases, courts held that a business incorporated State A, and manufacturing in State A, and that had its principal place of business in State A, but that used the mail system to ship goods to buyers in State B "consented" to jurisdiction in State B, solely by use of the shipments.  Note that under long-established law accepted even under the Pennoyer regime, an out-of-state defendant could consent to a forum's exercise of personal jurisdiction.  But again, no one believed that the business intended to consent to anything (other than getting paid) by shipping goods to a buyer located in a state.

In the next case, the Supreme Court cast aside these fictions and adopts a more functional test.  But you will need to keep these fictions in mind because the current Supreme Court, particularly the Court's dominant conservative wing, appears to be committed to reviving some of the fictions that existed before International Shoe.