Jurisdictional Limits on Recognition

Jurisdictional Limits on Recognition

The previous section left one condition standing: the rendering court must have had power to enter the judgment. A forum may not refuse credit because it dislikes the result, but it may ask whether the court that rendered the judgment had authority over the defendant and the subject matter. A court asked to give effect to another state's judgment may constitutionally inquire into that jurisdiction.¹ The inquiry has a constitutional footing. Since Pennoyer v. Neff, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has limited the power of state courts to bind persons not served within their borders.² A judgment entered without a proper jurisdictional basis or proper notice therefore violates the defendant's right to due process, and the Full Faith and Credit Clause does not require other states to recognize it.³ Justice Frankfurter, dissenting in Sherrer v. Sherrer, stated the logic: credit is owed to a judgment, and a judgment presupposes that the state had power to deal with the subject matter in controversy.⁴

The forum's inquiry can also reach the wrong answer. In McGee v. International Life Insurance Co., the Texas courts refused to enforce a California judgment against an insurer served by registered mail at its Texas office, holding the judgment void because California could not reach the insurer. The Supreme Court reversed, because California did have jurisdiction, and it was undisputed that Texas owed the judgment credit if California's jurisdiction was proper.⁵ Credit therefore depends on the jurisdictional answer, and the modern cases narrow how often the forum gets to ask the question again.

The general rule is that a judgment is entitled to credit even as to jurisdiction when the jurisdictional question was fully and fairly litigated and finally decided in the court that rendered it.⁶ The reason lies in who has already had a hearing. A defendant who appeared and contested jurisdiction had the chance to win in the rendering state and, if that failed, to appeal there. If the same question could be tried again in every state where the creditor looks for assets, the first decision would be only a first round, and the losing party would have every reason to keep relitigating.⁷ A defendant who never appeared has had no hearing at all, so the objection raised in the second state is the first occasion to raise it. That objection is called a collateral attack because it is made in a separate proceeding rather than by appeal in the rendering state. Few defenses survive collateral attack, and lack of personal jurisdiction is the unusual one that can be raised either way.⁸

The only difference between the two situations is whether the jurisdictional question was actually tried. Students lose this issue when they treat every jurisdictional objection as open in the second state, because the objection survives only where the rendering court never decided it after a real contest. The sections that follow take the two halves in turn: first the defect as a defense, then the finality of litigated jurisdiction, and then divorce decrees, where jurisdiction turns on domicile.

Jurisdictional Defects as a Defense

The first condition on credit concerns the rendering court's power, and the way the Supreme Court tells the history of the federal act shows why. Pennoyer v. Neff reports that the earliest cases assumed the act gave every judgment, in every other state, the effect it had where it was rendered.¹⁰ The Court later qualified that view, so that the act applies only when the court rendering the judgment had jurisdiction of the parties and of the subject matter, and it does not preclude an inquiry into that court's jurisdiction or into the rendering state's right to exercise authority over the person or the subject matter.¹¹ The resulting protection is the jurisdictional-defect defense. It is raised in a collateral proceeding, which means a separate suit or enforcement action in the second state, as opposed to an appeal within the rendering state.¹²

The decision Pennoyer singles out as stating this qualification most clearly is D'Arcy v. Ketchum. A creditor there sued in a federal court in Louisiana on a New York judgment entered under a state statute against two joint debtors, only one of whom had been served; the other was a nonresident. The Circuit Court treated the judgment as conclusive against the unserved debtor, and the Supreme Court reversed.¹³ Its reasoning ran through the practice of nations and of the states. Foreign countries disregard a personal judgment against someone who was never served and never had a day in court, no state of the Union was known to have given such a judgment credit, and state courts had held such judgments void. Among the states in 1790, a judgment that purported to bind a citizen of another state who was neither served nor defended was void in the foreign state, because neither the legislative nor the judicial jurisdiction of the rendering state had binding force there.¹⁴ The Court therefore held that Congress did not intend the act to declare a new rule reaching such judgments. A later decision that Pennoyer quotes put the underlying commitment this way: the act "was not designed to displace that principle of natural justice which requires a person to have notice of a suit before he can be conclusively bound by its result, nor those rules of public law which protect persons and property within one State from the exercise of jurisdiction over them by another."¹⁵

That sentence contains two separate reasons, and each answers a different problem. The notice reason is functional. A person who was never told of a suit had no chance to raise a defense, so treating its outcome as conclusive would bind the person to a result reached on the plaintiff's account alone. The territorial reason concerns power: the tribunals of one state have no jurisdiction over persons beyond its limits, and they can inquire into the obligations of an outsider only through the property that outsider holds within the state.¹⁶ The territorial reason also removes an incentive the clause would otherwise create. If every judgment traveled at full strength whatever the rendering court's power, a creditor could file in the state most willing to claim authority over a distant debtor and then collect through the debtor's home state, which would be unable to ask whether the first state had any right to command its resident. Allowing the forum to examine jurisdiction is how each state protects those within its borders from that outcome.

A judgment that cannot bind the person is not always wholly without effect, and Pennoyer marks the boundary. In that case Mitchell had obtained a personal judgment in an Oregon court against Neff, a nonresident served only by publication, and had attached no property until after the judgment was entered; the Court held the judgment invalid, so the sheriff's sale of Neff's land under it transferred no title.¹⁷ The Court then reported that in every case where a creditor had tried, under the federal act, to enforce in one state a personal judgment rendered in another against a nonresident who was neither served nor appeared, the judgment was held to have no binding force, except as to property in the rendering state that had been brought under the court's control in connection with the process.¹⁸ A proceeding of that kind binds only as a proceeding in rem, one that operates on a thing, and it does nothing beyond disposing of the property or the interest in it.¹⁹ Bissell v. Briggs, a Massachusetts decision of 1813 that Pennoyer cites, shows both halves. A creditor who attaches a nonresident debtor's goods in the creditor's state may apply them to the judgment, and the person holding the goods is protected against the debtor's later suit, because the court had power to that extent. If the goods fall short and the creditor sues on the judgment in the debtor's home state, the creditor fails, because the debtor was never amenable to the rendering court.²⁰ The court's power reaches as far as the thing it controls, and the credit the judgment earns stops at the same point.

A rendering court's own statement that it had jurisdiction does not close the inquiry. Justice Bradley's statement in Thompson v. Whitman, which Durfee v. Duke repeats, is that the jurisdiction of the court that rendered a judgment may be questioned in a collateral proceeding in another state despite Article IV, the act of 1790, and the averments contained in the record of the judgment itself.²¹ Pennoyer states the corollary: the record may be contradicted as to the facts that give the court jurisdiction, against its recital that those facts exist.²² The reason is that a recital costs the rendering court nothing. If it were conclusive, a court that wanted to reach an absent defendant could recite that process had been served and thereby supply the very power in question, and the defense would fail against any judgment that was carefully drafted. Students lose this issue when they treat the judgment's own recital of jurisdiction as proof of it. The second state looks at the facts the recital describes, such as whether process was in fact served and whether the defendant in fact appeared.

The defense has two built-in limits, and both keep the inquiry from becoming a rehearing of the case. The challenger carries a burden: a judgment that appears on its face to be the record of a court of general jurisdiction is presumed to rest on jurisdiction over the cause and the parties, unless extrinsic evidence or the record itself disproves it.²³ Once jurisdiction is shown, the clause forecloses any inquiry into the merits of the claim, the logic or consistency of the decision, or the validity of the legal principles behind it.²⁴ In Milliken v. Meyer the Colorado Supreme Court declared a Wyoming judgment void because the findings and the decree seemed irreconcilable. The Supreme Court reversed, since on the trial court's findings the defendant was domiciled in Wyoming and had been served in Colorado under a Wyoming statutory scheme reasonably calculated to give notice, so the supposed inconsistency went only to the merits.²⁵ A jurisdictional attack that fails therefore ends the matter, and the judgment receives the full credit it has at home.

The same defense reaches defects in subject-matter authority. In Clarke v. Clarke a South Carolina court ruled that a will had converted Connecticut land into personal property, and when the question arose in Connecticut, the Connecticut courts applied their own law and the Supreme Court affirmed, because South Carolina could not render a binding judgment about land outside its borders.²⁶ The case can look like a choice-of-law error, which would not justify refusing credit, but the real defect was the rendering court's lack of jurisdiction over the subject matter.²⁷ The older doctrine in this area has since been narrowed where the jurisdictional question was actually litigated in the rendering court, a limit the next section takes up.²⁸

On the personal side, the defense protects people who were never made parties. Hansberry v. Lee states that one is not bound by an in personam judgment in a suit in which he was neither designated a party nor made one by service of process, and that such a judgment is denied the credit the Constitution and the act prescribe.²⁹ In May v. Anderson a father obtained a Wisconsin decree awarding him custody after the only service on the mother was delivery of the papers to her in Ohio; she never appeared, and the Supreme Court held that Ohio need not give the custody decree full faith and credit, because the Wisconsin court had no personal jurisdiction over her.³⁰ In Estin v. Estin a Nevada divorce decree purported to wipe out the absent wife's alimony rights under an earlier New York judgment. Nevada had no power to adjudicate those rights over a person who was neither served nor before its court, so New York did not have to credit that part of the Nevada decree, although the decree still operated on marital status, a point the divorce section takes up.³¹

Step four carries both limits on the defense. Where power was lacking, credit is denied but the property in the rendering state remains subject to the judgment; where power existed, the forum has no further inquiry to make. The next section takes up the defendant who appeared in the rendering court and contested jurisdiction there, because the forum's inquiry narrows sharply once that question has been fully litigated and finally decided.³²

Fully Litigated Jurisdiction Is Final

The jurisdictional-defect defense has a limit, and the limit turns on a single variable: whether the jurisdictional question was actually tried and decided in the rendering court. The older cases let a second state inquire into the first court's power in a collateral proceeding, but the modern decisions describe a much narrower inquiry. The general rule that emerges is that a judgment is entitled to full faith and credit, even as to questions of jurisdiction, when those questions were fully and fairly litigated and finally decided in the court that rendered it.³⁴ The older rule therefore stays categorically true only where the judgment debtor did not litigate jurisdiction in the first forum, or had no opportunity to, and the first forum in fact lacked it.³⁵ This is the finality of litigated jurisdiction, the qualification that every use of the defense must pass through.

The defense gives way here for a reason that follows from what the defense protects. A person who was never served and never heard has had no chance to object, so a judgment against that person rests only on the plaintiff's account, and the second state may look behind the rendering court's claim of power. A party who appeared, presented its case, and was fully heard on jurisdiction has received exactly the opportunity the defense exists to guarantee. Allowing a second round would give the loser another try at the same question in every state where the plaintiff sought enforcement, and the answers could differ from state to state, leaving one judgment good in one state and void in another. There is also a mechanical route to the same result. The clause, as implemented by Congress, requires a state to give a judgment at least the res judicata effect it would have in the state that rendered it.³⁶ When the rendering state treats a competent court's decision on its own jurisdiction as conclusive against collateral attack, that finality travels with the judgment into every other state.³⁷

The Supreme Court reached the rule in stages, which Durfee v. Duke traces. The first stage concerned jurisdiction over the person. In Baldwin v. Iowa State Traveling Men's Assn., a federal court in Iowa had to honor a Missouri federal court's judgment even though the defendant claimed the Missouri court had no jurisdiction over it, because that claim had been fully litigated in Missouri.³⁸ The stated reason was that public policy calls for an end to litigation, so those who have contested an issue are bound by the result wherever a party voluntarily appears, presents its case, and is fully heard, unless fraud is shown.³⁹ The Court adhered to Baldwin the following year, observing that the principles of res judicata apply to questions of jurisdiction as well as to other issues.⁴⁰ The second stage reached subject-matter jurisdiction through Davis v. Davis, Stoll v. Gottlieb, Treinies v. Sunshine Mining Co., and Sherrer v. Sherrer. In each, a party asked a second court to retry the first court's jurisdiction over the subject matter, and in each the Court held that the question, having been fully litigated in the original forum, could not be retried in a later action between the parties.⁴¹

Davis and Sherrer show the pattern in divorce cases, where jurisdiction turns on the plaintiff's domicile. In Davis a husband obtained a Virginia divorce. The wife had appeared in Virginia, put his domicile in issue, introduced evidence that his claimed residence was false, and asked the court to sustain her plea. The Virginia finding that he was a bona fide resident for the required time therefore bound her in the courts of the District of Columbia.⁴² In Sherrer the husband had entered a general appearance in the Florida proceeding, pleaded the very matters he later wished to contest, testified, and kept counsel throughout. Massachusetts therefore could not allow the Florida decree to be attacked on the ground that the wife who obtained it had not been domiciled in Florida.⁴³ The divorce section below takes up domicile in more detail. The point here is that an appearance followed by a real contest produced a finding that bound the parties.

Durfee applies the same rule where the contested jurisdictional fact is geographic. The petitioners sued in Nebraska to quiet title to bottom land on the Missouri River, whose main channel forms the Nebraska-Missouri boundary. The Nebraska court had subject-matter jurisdiction only if the land lay in Nebraska, and that depended on whether a shift in the river's course had come by avulsion or by accretion.⁴⁴ The respondent appeared through counsel and explicitly contested jurisdiction. The trial court found for the petitioners, and the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed after a trial de novo, finding that the land was in Nebraska and that the Nebraska courts therefore had jurisdiction; the respondent did not seek certiorari.⁴⁵ Two months later she sued in Missouri to quiet title to the same land, alleging that it lay in Missouri. The federal district court, after removal, thought the land was in Missouri but held the Nebraska judgment res judicata, and the Court of Appeals reversed on the theory that a land dispute left a Missouri court free to retry the Nebraska court's jurisdiction.⁴⁶ The Supreme Court reversed. Nebraska law treated a competent court's determination of its own jurisdiction as closed to collateral attack, and the clause obliged Missouri to give the judgment that same effect, whatever the second court believed about where the river ran.⁴⁷

Durfee adds something to Davis and Sherrer. Those cases establish that a litigated finding about a person's domicile is final. Durfee establishes that a litigated finding about where a piece of land lies is equally final, which mattered because the Court had twice expressly left open whether jurisdictional finality applies to cases involving real property.⁴⁸ Land is therefore not a special case, and the variable that decides whether the second state may look is the same in all of them: whether the question was litigated. Durfee also marks what it does not decide. The respondent there had contested jurisdiction, and the Court noted that the case was not one in which a party with an opportunity to contest subject-matter jurisdiction failed to do so.⁴⁹ How far a later challenge by such a party may go is less settled, although ordinary preclusion principles suggest it will often be barred.⁵⁰

The special appearance in the first version did not preserve the objection for State B. It moved the contest to State A, and State A's decision on it, even though followed by a default on the merits, cannot be attacked in another state.⁵¹ A defendant therefore chooses one forum for the jurisdictional fight. Contesting in the rendering court binds the defendant to the answer, while staying away leaves the objection for the enforcement action at the price of the merits if the objection fails. Students lose this issue when they treat a litigated and lost objection as still open in the second state, because one litigated answer ends the matter. The same finality applies to a party who appeared generally and said nothing about personal jurisdiction, since that appearance waives the objection and closes it for a different reason.⁵²

Applying finality to a boundary dispute between private litigants does not leave the states without a way to fix their common line. The Court observed that the alternative of a negotiated settlement of any dispute between the States over the location of the boundary remains available.⁵³ Such an agreement is an interstate compact, which the Constitution permits states to make with the consent of Congress.⁵⁴

Step two carries the weight. A defendant who merely could have objected is in a different position from one who did, and Durfee involved the second.⁵⁵

Divorce Decrees and Domicile

Divorce is where the jurisdiction principles just taught meet their most frequent test, because the power to grant a divorce rests on a fact that parties can litigate, namely domicile. A state traditionally has jurisdiction to dissolve a marriage based on the petitioner's domicile in the forum state, and domicile means physical presence in the state together with the intention to remain there permanently. Domicile is therefore the kind of jurisdictional question the last section asked about. If the spouse now attacking a decree litigated it in the rendering court, the finding is final, and if no one ever litigated it, the second state's inquiry stays open. Marital status raises the stakes because it travels with the person. A decree valid where granted but ignored elsewhere would leave a couple divorced in one state and married in another, the situation called a limping marriage.⁵⁷ Two cases take the same clause to opposite ends of the spectrum, one with a spouse who contested domicile and one with a spouse who never appeared.

Davis v. Davis supplies the first pole. A husband obtained an absolute divorce in Virginia and then relied on that decree in the District of Columbia, where he asked the court to set aside or modify an earlier decree in his wife's favor. She answered that he had never been a Virginia resident. The Court of Appeals refused to credit the Virginia decree, reasoning that her special appearance did not give the Virginia court full jurisdiction and did not waive her objection to it.⁵⁸ The Supreme Court disagreed on the point that mattered. In Virginia the wife had put the husband's domicile in issue by plea, introduced evidence that his claimed residence was false, excepted to the commissioner's report, and asked the court to sustain her plea. The Virginia finding that he was a bona fide resident for the required time therefore bound her in the District, and she could not say he was not entitled to sue there.⁵⁹ Sherrer v. Sherrer later generalized the result: a defendant who took part in the divorce proceeding and had a full opportunity to contest jurisdiction cannot attack the decree on that ground in a sister state.⁶⁰

The reason follows from what the wife in Davis actually received. Domicile was the fact on which Virginia's power depended, she contested it before the Virginia court, and she lost after presenting her evidence. A second hearing in the District would give the loser another try at the same question, and the second court could reach the opposite answer, leaving the husband divorced in Virginia and still married in the District. The implementing statute forecloses that result by requiring the second court to give a judgment the credit it has in the rendering state, and Davis read the clause to demand full credit, not some.⁶¹ Sherrer added an incentive point. A defendant who had the chance to contest domicile and failed to use it bears the responsibility for that failure, and the failure does not open the decree to attack in another state.⁶²

The opposite pole is the spouse who never appeared. In Williams v. North Carolina, the first of two Williams decisions, Nevada had granted divorces to petitioners found to be Nevada domiciliaries, and the question was whether North Carolina had to recognize those decrees when the other spouses had been reached only by constructive service, meaning notice by publication or similar means rather than delivery of process in the state.⁶³ Under Haddock v. Haddock the answer would have been no. There the Court had held that New York, the matrimonial domicile where the wife still lived, need not credit a Connecticut decree her husband obtained after wrongfully leaving her, since she was served by publication and did not appear.⁶⁴ Williams rejected that theory so far as marital status is concerned, and held that a decree granted by one state in those circumstances must be credited in another.⁶⁵

The reasoning rests on what the clause was built to do. Under Haddock a decree good where granted could be disregarded in the state the abandoned spouse called home, so the marriage would stand in one state and be dissolved in another. The Court answered that exceptions to full credit for judgments have been few, because the clause was meant to end the status of the states as independent foreign sovereigns, each free to ignore obligations created by the proceedings of the others, and to make them parts of a single nation.⁶⁶ In divorce terms, a state must recognize a decree granted to a spouse domiciled in the sister state even though the other spouse neither appeared nor was served there.

The two cases rest on different footings, and an answer that blends them goes wrong. In Davis the spouse attacking the decree had litigated domicile, so a finding made after a real contest bound that spouse. In Williams the absent spouse had litigated nothing, so the credit owed rests on the rendering state's power over the status of its own domiciliary, and no finding binds the absent spouse. That difference explains why the second Williams decision allows the decree-granting state's finding of domicile to be reexamined, so that a second state may test whether the petitioner's domicile was bona fide. The Williams rules govern the ex parte divorce, in which the court has personal jurisdiction over only one spouse.

One fact separates the two versions: whether the attacking spouse litigated domicile in the rendering state. Students lose this issue when they ask only whether the attacking spouse was served, and never ask whether domicile was actually litigated. Service by publication does not by itself make a domicile finding vulnerable, and an appearance does not by itself make it safe. Vulnerability depends on whether the question was contested and decided after a real opportunity to contest it.

Credit for a decree resting on domicile also has an edge. The domicile-based power reaches the marriage itself, and it does not reach the absent spouse's personal rights. In Estin v. Estin the Nevada decree could end the marriage, but it could not wipe out the absent wife's alimony rights under an earlier New York judgment, because Nevada was attempting to exercise personal jurisdiction over a person who was not before its court, a power the Court had long denied since Pennoyer v. Neff.⁶⁷ The result is a divisible divorce, credited on status and ineffective on support.⁶⁸ May v. Anderson drew the same line for custody, holding that Ohio did not have to credit the custody part of a Wisconsin decree entered against a mother who was never subject to Wisconsin's personal jurisdiction.⁶⁹

Step three separates the two cases taught here, and step four marks the limit that Estin and May supply.