Effect Under Rendering-State Law

Effect Under Rendering-State Law

Once a forum accepts that a sister-state judgment commands credit, the question becomes how much credit, and the answer comes from the state that rendered the judgment rather than from the forum. The formulation traces to Chief Justice Marshall's opinion in Hampton v. M'Connel, which Williams v. North Carolina later repeated: a state-court judgment should have "the same credit, validity, and effect, in every other court in the United States, which it had in the state where it was pronounced," and "whatever pleas would be good to a suit thereon in such state, and none others, could be pleaded in any other court in the United States."¹ Williams added that this view has survived substantially intact.² The sentence has two halves that matter equally. A judgment carries with it every protection it enjoys at home, and it carries nothing more.

Congress wrote the same measure into the statute. Under 28 U.S.C. § 1738, authenticated records and judicial proceedings have the same full faith and credit in every court in the United States as they have by law or usage in the courts of the state from which they are taken.³ Durfee restated the consequence in terms of res judicata, the body of rules that decides when a final judgment bars a second suit on the same claim (claim preclusion) or a renewed dispute over an issue already decided (issue preclusion).⁴ Full faith and credit, Durfee said, generally requires every state to give a judgment at least the res judicata effect it would receive in the state that rendered it.⁵ Read together with the statute's command to give the same credit the judgment has by law or usage where it was rendered, that formula makes the rendering state's law the yardstick. Because the clause turns each state's local doctrines of res judicata into part of national law, whether a forum honored them is a federal question that the Supreme Court can review.⁶

Each part of the arrangement has its own reason. A single, identifiable body of law gives every forum the same answer, so the parties know how far the judgment bars further litigation the moment it is entered, without waiting to see where a later suit is filed.⁷ The incentive reasoning is subtler. If each forum applied its own preclusion rules, a judgment's force would depend on the place of the next suit, and whichever party gained from a stronger or weaker judgment would have a reason to shop for the friendliest state. A defendant who lost could move to a state with narrow preclusion rules and relitigate, and a winning plaintiff could carry the judgment to a state whose rules reach further than the rendering state's. One yardstick removes the payoff from that choice, and with it the temptation. The "no more" half does separate work: the rendering court decided the case, and the parties litigated it, under that state's understanding of what the judgment would settle, so crossing a border should neither strengthen the judgment nor weaken it.

In Durfee v. Duke the method can be watched in operation. A Nebraska court quieted title to bottom land on the Missouri River after the opposing party appeared and litigated, and the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed; the losing party then sued in a Missouri court over the same land, and the case landed in a federal district court sitting there.⁸ The Supreme Court began by asking what the Nebraska courts would do with their own judgment, and it was undisputed that they would give it full res judicata effect.⁹ Nebraska's rule, as its own supreme court had stated it, treats the judgment of a court competent to decide whether the facts give it jurisdiction as conclusive against everyone and immune from collateral attack, unless it is reversed on appeal or set aside for error or fraud in a direct proceeding.¹⁰ The federal court in Missouri therefore owed the Nebraska judgment exactly that conclusiveness, and the court of appeals erred in holding otherwise on the ground that the controversy involved land.¹¹ Why a rule of that kind survives even when the disputed issue is the rendering court's own jurisdiction is taken up in the sections on jurisdictional limits below. What matters here is the order of the inquiry: the Court first asked what the rendering state would do, and then required the forum to do the same.

The same two steps govern when the preclusion rules themselves are the contested point. In Schultz v. Boy Scouts of America, Inc., a New York court had to decide whether plaintiffs whose claims had already been dismissed in New Jersey under that state's charitable immunity statute could relitigate the point. It framed the question as whether New Jersey's courts would hold the plaintiffs barred, applied New Jersey's rules on issue preclusion, and held that they were.¹² The yardstick can also make a judgment stronger than the forum's own law would. In Aldrich v. Aldrich a Florida decree ordered alimony to continue beyond the husband's death. Florida law treated that term as erroneous but, once no appeal was taken, immune from collateral attack. When the husband died in West Virginia, whose policy apparently opposed alimony that outlives the obligor, the West Virginia court refused to enforce the decree against his estate. The Supreme Court held enforcement mandatory because Florida would have required it.¹³ Whether a forum's contrary policy ever counts as a defense is the question the next section answers.

Students most often go wrong by applying the forum's own preclusion rules simply because the second suit is being heard in the forum. The forum's rules govern its own judgments, and they do not set the weight of someone else's.

The "and no more" half has a real-case anchor as well. A concurring opinion in Baker v. General Motors Corp. observed that the first step in a full-faith-and-credit analysis is to determine the effect the judgment has in the issuing state, and that if the issuing state's courts would not give the judgment preclusive effect, the courts of the United States can accord it no greater efficacy.¹⁴ Michigan, the issuing state there, adhered to mutuality of estoppel, and the Bakers had not been parties to the Michigan proceeding, so on that analysis Michigan would not have treated them as bound.¹⁵ Reaching that conclusion ended the inquiry before any exception to full faith and credit had to be considered, which shows why checking the rendering state's own law first can resolve a problem without reaching harder doctrine.

The second plea in that pair is the kind that the phrase "none others" in Hampton excludes.¹⁶ Running the analysis in the right order is what keeps the forum's law out of it, and the steps can be run as follows.

The second step does the real work. A reader who skips straight to the forum's rules will often reach a plausible answer that turns out to be the wrong court's answer.

Measuring a judgment's effect is a different task from collecting on it, and the rule that a judgment gets no more than it has at home does not strip the forum of control over its own procedure. A sister-state judgment does not stand on the footing of a domestic judgment that can be enforced by execution. The manner of enforcement is left to the law of the state where the judgment is sued on, pleaded, or offered in evidence, and once the judgment is duly pleaded and proved it is conclusive and not merely prima facie evidence of the rights adjudicated.¹⁷ The judgment does not carry the force of an execution into another state, so to acquire that force it must become a judgment there and can be executed only as the forum's laws permit.¹⁸ In practice the creditor either files a new action in the forum on the sister-state judgment or, where the state has enacted the Uniform Enforcement of Foreign Judgments Act, registers the judgment, and then uses the forum's execution and garnishment process against assets located there.¹⁹ The requirement rests on sovereignty: one state's sheriff does not act in another state on the strength of the first state's paper, so the forum is asked to recognize the judgment so that execution can follow.²⁰ The route chosen has a consequence. A suit on the judgment under full faith and credit leaves open only defenses the rendering state would recognize, whereas registration under the uniform act treats the filed judgment as subject to the forum's procedures for reopening, vacating, or staying a local judgment. The forum's law therefore governs how the judgment is collected, and the rendering state's law governs what the judgment is worth.