Clause and Implementing Statute

Clause and Implementing Statute

Section 1 is built from two sentences that do different work, and it is easier to apply once they are kept apart. The first sentence is a command addressed to every state: full faith and credit must be given to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.¹ The second sentence is a grant of power to Congress, which may prescribe by general laws the manner in which those acts, records, and proceedings are proved and the effect they carry.² In Huntington v. Attrill the Court described the clause as having three distinct objects. It declares, by its own force, that every state's judgments receive full faith and credit. It authorizes Congress to prescribe how they are authenticated, meaning how a copy is certified so that a court will accept it as genuine. And it authorizes Congress to prescribe their effect once authenticated.³ The first object operates without any statute. The other two leave work for Congress, and the first Congress took it up.

The command makes sense only against what came before it. Under the common law the colonies inherited, the courts of each colony were treated as foreign to the others. A judgment from a neighboring colony therefore counted as a foreign judgment, which was only prima facie evidence of what it decided (evidence that suffices unless the opposing party rebuts it) and could be reexamined on the merits.⁴ The Articles of Confederation had tried a less perfect version of the same command.⁵ The reason the problem called for a constitutional answer is mechanical. If a sister-state judgment can be retried, a creditor who has already won must prove the claim again in every state where the debtor holds assets. A debtor who lost, in turn, has every reason to move assets to a state that will grant a second trial.

Against that background the clause has a purpose the Court has stated in consistent terms. In Baker v. General Motors Corp. the Court, quoting Milwaukee County v. White Co., said the aim was to alter the status of the states as independent foreign sovereignties, each free to ignore obligations created by the laws or judicial proceedings of the others. The clause makes them integral parts of a single nation in which a remedy on a just obligation can be demanded as of right, whatever the state of its origin.⁶ The clause thus replaced comity, which is a forum's voluntary courtesy toward another sovereign's decisions, with a command.⁷ The early cases show how much turned on that choice. Courts first disagreed about whether a sister-state judgment was conclusive or open to impeachment. In Mills v. Duryee the Court held it conclusive, reasoning that treating such judgments as merely prima facie evidence would make the clause illusory, because the common law already gave them that much.⁸

Congress used the second sentence in the Act of May 26, 1790. It provided that the records and judicial proceedings of a state's courts, once authenticated, receive in every court within the United States the faith and credit they have by law or usage in the courts of the state from which they are taken.⁹ The same rule now appears in 28 U.S.C. § 1738, which gives a state's authenticated records and judicial proceedings the same full faith and credit in every court within the United States and its Territories and Possessions as they have in the courts of the state, territory, or possession that produced them.¹⁰ The statute thus performs both tasks the second sentence permits. It prescribes the manner of proof, and it fixes the effect by pointing to the rendering state's own courts. The proof half has a practical side: a footnote in Milliken v. Meyer observed that the Wyoming judgment apparently had not been proved in the way Revised Statutes § 905 (the 1790 Act as carried forward) prescribes. The Court treated that gap as beyond complaint because the Colorado trial court had given the judgment credit anyway.¹¹

The effect half carries the main weight, because it supplies one yardstick for every sister-state judgment. A judgment is worth in another state exactly what it is worth where it was rendered, so the same judgment does not carry fifty different weights depending on which forum is asked to honor it. That uniformity and certainty is what the clause was understood to promote.¹² The next section develops what measuring a judgment by the rendering state's law requires. The division of labor seen here, a constitutional duty stated in general terms and a congressional statute that supplies the machinery, returns when this chapter reaches extradition.

The words "full faith and credit" have been read to mean what they say. Williams v. North Carolina repeated that Article IV, § 1 and the 1790 Act require "not some, but full" faith and credit to a state court's judgment, a formulation it drew from Davis v. Davis.¹³ The Court has also been reluctant to admit exceptions where judgments are concerned, and in Williams it described the actual exceptions as few and far between.¹⁴ The reason follows from the clause's design. Every exception lets the second state reopen what the first state decided, which restores the retrial problem the clause was written to end. The later sections test how far that reluctance extends, first against a forum's own policy and then against defects in the rendering court's jurisdiction.

The clause is addressed to the states, and the statute widens its audience. The Act of 1790 extended the constitutional rule to all courts, federal as well as state.¹⁵ In Durfee v. Duke a Nebraska court, after the losing party appeared and fully litigated, entered a judgment quieting title to bottom land on the Missouri River, and the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed. The loser then sued in a Missouri court over the same land, and the case was removed to a federal district court in Missouri. The Supreme Court framed the question under the clause and the implementing statute, restated the command in the statute's terms, and reversed a court of appeals that had held the federal court need not give the Nebraska judgment that credit.¹⁶ The federal court sitting in Missouri stood where a Missouri state court would have stood. A federal court sitting in a state is bound equally with that state's own courts to observe the command.¹⁷ The statute and the clause speak to the effect of state-court judgments, so the effect of a federal judgment in a later case rests on federal law rather than on these provisions.¹⁸

The clause's text also reaches public acts and records, and a statute counts as a public act.¹⁹ The Judicial Code revision that produced § 1738 added the acts of state legislatures to the statute's text.²⁰ This chapter stays with judgments, because the demand there is of a different order. The clause does not require a state to substitute another state's statutes for its own on a subject the forum may regulate, but as to judgments the obligation is exacting.²¹

The clause also has a boundary on the other side. It reaches only judgments of "every other State," so a foreign-country judgment falls outside it.²² No constitutional or treaty-free duty compels a state court to give effect to the judgment of another nation's court, and any recognition rests on comity.²³

The two sentences of Section 1 and the statute Congress enacted under the second sentence therefore combine into a single rule, which is the one to hold for any problem that involves a sister-state judgment.