[1] The plaintiff, actress Shirley Jones, sued the defendants, the National Enquirer, its distributor, the writer of the article, and Calder, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, over an October 9, 1979 article in which the Enquirer alleged that Jones was an alcoholic.

The issue presented to the U.S. Supreme Court was whether the sale of a magazine article provided sufficient minimum contacts to permit the assertion of personal jurisdiction over the editor of that article, pursuant to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Petitioners argued that, because they were merely employees of the libelous newspaper, their case was analogous to a welder who works on a boiler in Florida that subsequently explodes in California.

The Court distinguishes this by noting that unlike the welder they intentionally targeted the California contact.

On the same day as this decision was reported, the Court held in Keeton v. Hustler Magazine, Inc. (1984) that jurisdiction would also be found even where the party injured by the libelous assertion was not a resident of the state where the lawsuit was brought.