Constitutional US Law

Tag: Judgments

  • Service on Foreign Corporations

    Service on Foreign CorporationsIn 1856, the Court decided Lafayette Ins. Co. v. French,37 a pioneer case in its general class. It held that, where a corporation chartered by the State of Indiana was allowed by a law of Ohio to transact business in the latter state upon the condition that service of …

  • Service on Nonresident Motor Vehicle Owners

    Service on Nonresident Motor Vehicle OwnersBy analogy to the above cases, it has been held that a state may require nonresident owners of motor vehicles to designate an official within the state as an agent upon whom process may be served in any legal proceedings growing out of their operation of a …

  • Judgments in Rem

    Judgments in RemIn sustaining the challenge to jurisdiction in cases involving judgments in personam, the Court in the main was making only a somewhat more extended application of recognized principles. In order to sustain the same kind of challenge in cases involving judgments in rem it has had to …

  • Divorce Decrees

    Divorce Decrees: Domicile as the Jurisdictional PrerequisiteThis, however, was only the beginning of the Court's lawmaking in cases in rem. The most important class of such cases is that in which the respondent to a suit for divorce offers in defense an earlier decree from the courts of a sister…

  • Divorce Suit

    Divorce Suit: In Rem or in Personam; Judicial IndecisionIn 1906, however, by a vote of five to four, the Court departed from its earlier ruling, rendered five years previously in Atherton v. Atherton,49 and in Haddock v. Haddock,50 it announced that a divorce proceeding might be viewed as one in per…

  • Williams I

    Williams I and Williams IIIn Williams I and Williams II, the husband of one marriage and the wife of another left North Carolina, obtained six-week divorce decrees in Nevada, married there, and resumed their residence in North Carolina where both previously had been married and domiciled. Prosecuted…

  • Williams II

    Cases Following Williams IIFears registered by the dissenters in the second Williams case that it might undermine the stability of all divorces and that the court of each forum state, by its own independent determination of domicile, might refuse recognition of foreign decrees, were temporarily set …

  • Forum State

    Claims for Alimony or Property in Forum StateIn Esenwein v. Commonwealth,63 decided on the same day as the second Williams case, the Supreme Court also sustained a Pennsylvania court in its refusal to recognize an ex parte Nevada decree on the ground that the husband who obtained it never acquired a…

  • Alimony

    Decrees Awarding Alimony, Custody of ChildrenA byproduct of divorce litigation are decrees for the payment of alimony, judgments for accrued and unpaid installments of alimony, and judicial awards of the custody of children, all of which necessitate application of the Full Faith and Credit Clause wh…

  • Status of the Law

    Status of the LawThe doctrine of divisible divorce, as developed by Justice Douglas in Estin v. Estin,83 may have become the prevailing standard for determining the enforceability of foreign divorce decrees. If this is the case, then it may be that an ex parte divorce, founded upon acquisition of do…

  • Probate Decrees

    Probate DecreesMany judgments, enforcement of which has given rise to litigation, embrace decrees of courts of probate respecting the distribution of estates. In order that a court have jurisdiction of such a proceeding, the decedent must have been domiciled in the state, and the question whether he…

  • Adoption Decrees

    Adoption DecreesThat a statute legitimizing children born out of wedlock does not entitle them by the aid of the Full Faith and Credit Clause to share in the property located in another state is not surprising, in view of the general principle (to which there are exceptions) that statutes do not hav…

  • Garnishment Decrees

    Garnishment DecreesGarnishment proceedings combine some of the elements of both an in rem and an in personam action. Suppose that A owes B and B owes C, and that the two former live in a different state from C. A, while on a brief visit to C's state, is presented with a writ attaching his…

  • Judgments

    Judgments in GeneralArticle IV, § 1, has had its principal operation in relation to judgments. Embraced within the relevant discussions are two principal classes of judgments. First, those in which the judgment involved was offered as a basis of proceedings for its own enforcement outside the s…

  • Penal Judgments

    Penal Judgments: Types Entitled to RecognitionThe Full Faith and Credit Clause has been interpreted in the light of the "incontrovertible maxim" that "the courts of no country execute the penal laws of another." 97 In the leading case of Huntington v. Attrill,98 however, the Cour…