Concept

Choosing the Right Clause

Full Faith and Credit and Interstate Extradition

Choosing the Right Clause

Article IV places two interstate commitments side by side, and most fact patterns in which one state wants something from another can be sorted by asking what the demanding state is holding. The first commits each state to give full faith and credit to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.¹ The second provides that a person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime, who flees and is found in another state, shall be delivered up on demand of the executive authority of the state the person fled.² Both answer one structural problem, that states joined in a single nation should not treat one another as foreign territory, but they work through different institutions because the thing each state holds is different.³

Full faith and credit operates on a completed adjudication. To recognize a judgment is to give it preclusive effect, treating it as the final resolution of the issues it decided between the parties so that they may not litigate those issues again.⁴ The mechanism follows from that purpose. If the forum could rehear the merits, a winner would have to win twice, and a loser would have every reason to cross a state line in search of a second trial. So the judgment holder takes the judgment to a court of the forum state, and that court gives it the effect it carries in the rendering state and examines the rendering court's jurisdiction only within the limits taught above.⁵ Unless the judgment is nonfinal or defective, recognition is required almost without exception, and unlike the treatment of sister-state law, no public policy exception lets a forum refuse a judgment because it dislikes the underlying claim.⁶

Extradition operates on a person, and no adjudication exists yet. The demanding state holds only a charge, its courts have decided nothing, and so there is no result for a forum court to honor. The clause aims at a different danger, which is that a state might become a safe haven where a person charged elsewhere can wait out the process of the state that wants the person.⁷ That danger is met by prompt return of the person to the state with jurisdiction of the crime, which is the removal the clause commands.⁸ The federal Act supplies the procedure, and it runs from executive to executive: the demanding governor demands the person and produces a copy of an indictment or magistrate's affidavit certified as authentic, and the asylum governor must then cause the person to be arrested, notify the demanding authority, and deliver the person to its agent.⁹ Michigan v. Doran described the Extradition Clause as expressing the concepts of comity and full faith and credit in mandatory language.¹⁰ That kinship explains why the two clauses are easy to confuse, and the difference in what each state holds explains why they have to be kept apart.

One structural link joins the two halves. The second sentence of Section 1 gives Congress power to prescribe by general laws how the acts, records, and proceedings of each state are proved and what effect they have.¹¹ As restated in California v. Superior Court, the Court has held the Extradition Act of 1793 to be a proper exercise of Congress's powers under the Extradition Clause and under that Section 1 authority.¹² The overlap shows in the Act's core requirement, an authenticated copy of a charging paper, which is a rule about how an official record is proved. Each clause keeps its own job even though Congress's Section 1 power helps support the statute that serves the other.

Exam Analysis Steps

Because the choice depends on what the demanding state holds, it can be run as a short sorting exercise. The steps are these:

Ask what the other state wants from the forum, meaning whether it asks the forum to honor a completed adjudication or to return a person who is charged with a crime and has fled.
If the request rests on a final judgment, apply the Full Faith and Credit Clause, expect a court of the forum to give the judgment the effect it has in the rendering state, and examine jurisdiction only within the limits taught above.
If the request rests on a charge against a person who left the demanding state, apply the Extradition Clause and the federal Act, and look for a demand from the demanding governor with a certified indictment or magistrate's affidavit.
If the complaint is only that a state treats out-of-state citizens worse than its own, set both clauses aside, because that grievance belongs to a separate clause.

Hypothetical Illustration

A contractor in State A loses a civil suit that ends in a final money judgment for the client, and the contractor then moves to State B. The client takes the judgment to a State B court and asks that it be enforced. A completed adjudication is being offered to a court, so the Full Faith and Credit Clause governs.

Change what State A holds. Instead of a judgment, a State A grand jury has indicted the contractor for felony fraud, the contractor has left, and State A's governor sends State B's governor a demand with a certified copy of the indictment. There is no adjudication to honor, only a charge against a person, so the Extradition Clause and the federal Act govern, and State B's governor must arrange arrest and delivery to State A's agent.

Now give State A both. The judgment and the indictment arise from the same facts and the same contractor, yet they travel separately: the judgment goes to a State B court, and the demand goes to the State B governor. A State B court does not hand the contractor over to State A on the strength of a civil judgment, and the State B governor does not collect money because of an indictment.

The first two scenes change the clause by changing what State A holds. The third keeps the parties and the underlying events constant and still produces two different clauses, which shows that the subject matter of the dispute does not select the clause. Students lose this issue when the same underlying facts are allowed to pick the clause. Sorting by what the demanding state holds, a final judgment or a charge against a fugitive, gives the right answer each time.

A third commitment sits between these two in the same Article and does neither job. The Privileges and Immunities Clause guarantees a citizen who goes into another state the same fundamental privileges that state gives its own citizens, so it works as a rule against discrimination aimed at out-of-staters.¹³ It shares a purpose with the neighboring clauses on full faith and credit and on extradition, which is to help fuse independent states into one nation.¹⁴ A complaint of discrimination against out-of-staters therefore belongs to that clause, and no judgment or fugitive is in the picture.

Choosing the Right Clause

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