full faith and credit clause
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 320 U.S. 430 - Magnolia Petroleum Co. v. Hunt · 1943Most cited · 784 citing opinions
The full faith and credit clause like the commerce clause thus became a nationally unifying force. It altered the status of the several states as independent foreign sovereignties, each free to ignore rights and obligations created under the laws or established by the judicial proceedings of the others, by making each an integral part of a single nation, in which rights judicially established in any part are given nation-wide application.
How the Supreme Court has restated “full faith and credit clause”
Each Supreme Court definition of “full faith and credit clause,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “full faith and credit clause”
Court decisions citing the 4 opinions that defined “full faith and credit clause” — 1,624 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 4 definitions, chronological · 1839–1943
- ORIGINAL
By the law of the 26th of May, 1790, the judgment is made a debt of record, not examinable upon its merits; but it does not carry with it, into another state, the efficacy of a judgment upon property or persons, to be enforced by execution. To give it the force of a judgment in another state, it must be made a judgment there; and can only be executed in the latter as its laws may permit.
effect of sister-state judgment
It was the purpose of that provision to preserve rights acquired or confirmed under the public acts and judicial proceedings of one state by requiring recognition of their validity in others. But the very nature of the federal union of states, to each of which is reserved the sovereign right to make its own laws, precludes resort to the Constitution as the means for compelling one state wholly to subordinate its own laws and policy concerning its peculiarly domestic affairs to the laws and policy of others.
That clause compels that controversies be stilled so that where a state court has jurisdiction of the parties and subject matter, its judgment controls in other states to the same extent as it does in the state where rendered. By the Constitutional provision for full faith and credit, the local doctrines of res judicata, speaking generally, become a part of national jurisprudence, and therefore federal questions cognizable here.