In the case of Hess v. Pawloski, 1926, the US Supreme Court upheld a Massachusetts law that allowed for non-resident motorists to be served with legal process by serving it on an appointed state official. The court ruled in favor of Pawloski and held that such laws did not violate due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiff, Hess, had argued that he was denied his constitutional right because he was not personally served with notice of a lawsuit filed against him after causing an accident in Massachusetts while driving through from Pennsylvania. However, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing for the majority opinion stated that by using roads within a state's jurisdiction, drivers implicitly consented to such conditions as part of their privilege to drive there.

In the dissenting opinion for Hess v. Pawloski, Justice Pierce Butler argued that Massachusetts' statute requiring non-resident motorists to appoint a state official as their attorney for service of process violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He contended that it was unreasonable and arbitrary to assume all non-residents would not voluntarily appear in court or be able to receive notice through traditional methods. Furthermore, he believed this law unfairly discriminated against out-of-state drivers by imposing burdens on them not placed on residents. In his view, such legislation overstepped states’ rights under federalism principles by allowing one state’s laws to have extraterritorial effects without reciprocal agreements with other states.