A judgment is conclusive as to all the
media
concludendi, and it cannot be impeached either in or out of
the state by showing that it was based on a mistake of law.
A judgment of a court of a state in which the cause of action
did not arise, but based on an award of arbitration had in the
state in which the cause did arise, is conclusive, and, under the
full faith and credit clause of the federal Constitution, must be
given effect in the latter state, notwithstanding the award was for
a claim which could not, under the laws of that state, have been
enforced in any of its courts.
80 Miss. 757 reversed.
The facts are stated in the opinion.
Page 210 U. S. 233
MR. JUSTICE HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.
This is an action upon a Missouri judgment, brought in a court
of Mississippi. The declaration set forth the record of the
judgment. The defendant pleaded that the original cause of action
arose in Mississippi out of a gambling transaction in cotton
futures; that he declined to pay the loss; that the controversy was
submitted to arbitration, the question as to the illegality
Page 210 U. S. 234
of the transaction, however, not being included in the
submission; that an award was rendered against the defendant; that
thereafter, finding the defendant temporarily in Missouri, the
plaintiff brought suit there upon the award; that the trial court
refused to allow the defendant to show the nature of the
transaction, and that, by the laws of Mississippi, the same was
illegal and void, but directed a verdict if the jury should find
that the submission and award were made, and remained unpaid, and
that a verdict was rendered and the judgment in suit entered upon
the same. (The plaintiff in error is an assignee of the judgment,
but nothing turns upon that.) The plea was demurred to on
constitutional grounds, and the demurrer was overruled, subject to
exception. Thereupon replications were filed, again setting up the
Constitution of the United States (Art. IV, § 1), and were demurred
to. The Supreme Court of Mississippi held the plea good and the
replications bad, and judgment was entered for the defendant.
Thereupon the case was brought here.
The main argument urged by the defendant to sustain the judgment
below is addressed to the jurisdiction of the Mississippi
courts.
The laws of Mississippi make dealing in futures a misdemeanor,
and provide that contracts of that sort, made without intent to
deliver the commodity or to pay the price, "shall not be enforced
by any court." Annotated Code of 1892, §§ 1120, 1121, 2117. The
defendant contends that this language deprives the Mississippi
courts of jurisdiction, and that the case is like
Anglo-American Provision Co. v. Davis Provision Co.,
191 U. S. 373.
There, the New York statutes refused to provide a court into which
a foreign corporation could come, except upon causes of action
arising within the state, etc., and it was held that the State of
New York was under no constitutional obligation to give
jurisdiction to its supreme court against its will. One question is
whether that decision is in point.
No doubt it sometimes may be difficult to decide whether certain
words in a statute are directed to jurisdiction or to
Page 210 U. S. 235
merits, but the distinction between the two is plain. One goes
to the power, the other only to the duty, of the court. Under the
common law, it is the duty of a court of general jurisdiction not
to enter a judgment upon a parol promise made without
consideration; but it has power to do it, and, if it does, the
judgment is unimpeachable unless reversed. Yet a statute could be
framed that would make the power -- that is, the jurisdiction -- of
the court dependent upon whether there was a consideration or not.
Whether a given statute is intended simply to establish a rule of
substantive law, and thus to define the duty of the court, or is
meant to limit its power is a question of construction and common
sense. When it affects a court of general jurisdiction and deals
with a matter upon which that court must pass, we naturally are
slow to read ambiguous words as meaning to leave the judgment open
to dispute or as intended to do more than to fix the rule by which
the court should decide.
The case quoted concerned a statute plainly dealing with the
authority and jurisdiction of the New York court. The statute now
before us seems to us only to lay down a rule of decision. The
Mississippi court in which this action was brought is a court of
general jurisdiction, and would have to decide upon the validity of
the bar if the suit upon the award or upon the original cause of
action had been brought there. The words "shall not be enforced by
any court" are simply another, possibly less emphatic, way of
saying that an action shall not be brought to enforce such
contracts. As suggested by the counsel for the plaintiff in error,
no one would say that the words of the Mississippi statute of
frauds, "[a]n action shall not be brought whereby to charge a
defendant," Code 1892, § 4225, go to the jurisdiction of the court.
Of course, it could be argued that logically they had that scope,
but common sense would revolt.
See 191 U.S.
191 U. S. 375.
A stronger case than the present is
General Oil Co. v.
Crain, 209 U. S. 211,
209 U. S. 216.
We regard this question as open under the decisions below, and we
have expressed our opinion upon it independent of the effect of the
judgment, although it might be that, even if jurisdiction of the
original cause of action
Page 210 U. S. 236
was withdrawn, it remained with regard to a suit upon a judgment
based upon an award, whether the judgment or award was conclusive
or not. But it might be held that the law as to jurisdiction in one
case followed the law in the other, and therefore we proceed at
once to the further question whether the illegality of the original
cause of action in Mississippi can be relied upon there as a ground
for denying a recovery upon a judgment of another state.
The doctrine laid down by Chief Justice Marshall was
"that the judgment of a state court 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 that
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."
Hampton v.
M'Connel, 3 Wheat. 234. There is no doubt that this
quotation was supposed to be an accurate statement of the law as
late as
Christmas v.
Russell, 5 Wall. 290, where an attempt of
Mississippi, by statute, to go behind judgments recovered in other
states was declared void and it was held that such judgments could
not be impeached even for fraud.
But the law is supposed to have been changed by the decision in
Wisconsin v. Pelican Ins. Co., 127 U.
S. 265. That was a suit brought in this Court by the
State of Wisconsin upon a Wisconsin judgment against a foreign
corporation. The judgment was for a fine or penalty imposed by the
Wisconsin statutes upon such corporations doing business in the
state and failing to make certain returns, and the ground of
decision was that the jurisdiction given to this Court by Art. III,
§ 2, as rightly interpreted by the Judiciary Act, now Rev.Stat. §
687, was confined to "controversies of a civil nature," which the
judgment in suit was not. The case was not within the words of Art.
I, § 1, and, if it had been, still it would not have, and could not
have, decided anything relevant to the question before us. It is
true that language was used which has been treated as meaning that
the original claim upon which a judgment is based
Page 210 U. S. 237
may be looked into further than Chief Justice Marshall supposed.
But evidently it meant only to justify the conclusion reached upon
the specific point decided, for the proviso was inserted that a
court "cannot go behind the judgment for the purpose of examining
into the validity of the claim ." 127 U.S.
127 U. S. 293.
However, the whole passage was only a dictum, and it is not worth
while to spend much time upon it.
We assume that the statement of Chief Justice Marshall is
correct. It is confirmed by the Act of May 26, 1790, c. 11, 1 Stat.
122, providing that the said records and judicial proceedings
"shall have such faith and credit given to them in every court
within the United States as they have by law or usage in the courts
of the state from whence the said records are or shall be
taken."
See further Tilt v. Kelsey, 207 U. S.
43,
207 U. S. 57.
Whether the award would or would not have been conclusive, and
whether the ruling of the Missouri court upon that matter was right
or wrong, there can be no question that the judgment was conclusive
in Missouri on the validity of the cause of action.
Pitts v.
Fugate, 41 Mo. 405;
State ex Rel. Hudson v. Trammel,
106 Mo. 510;
In re Copenhaver, 118 Mo. 377. A judgment is
conclusive as to all the
media concludendi, United States v.
California & Oregon Land Co., 192 U.
S. 355, and it needs no authority to show that it cannot
be impeached either in or out of the state by showing that it was
based upon a mistake of law. Of course, a want of jurisdiction over
either the person or the subject matter might be shown.
Andrews
v. Andrews, 188 U. S. 14;
Clarke v. Clarke, 178 U. S. 186.
But, as the jurisdiction of the Missouri court is not open to
dispute, the judgment cannot be impeached in Mississippi even if it
went upon a misapprehension of the Mississippi law.
See Godard
v. Gray, L.R. 6 Q.B. 139;
MacDonald v. Grand Trunk Ry.
Co., 71 N.H. 448;
Peet v. Hatcher, 112 Ala. 514.
We feel no apprehensions that painful or humiliating
consequences will follow upon our decision. No court would give
judgment for a plaintiff unless it believed that the facts were a
cause of action by the law determining their effect. Mistakes
Page 210 U. S. 238
will be rare. In this case, the Missouri court no doubt supposed
that the award was binding by the law of Mississippi. If it was
mistaken, it made a natural mistake. The validity of its judgment,
even in Mississippi, is, as we believe, the result of the
Constitution as it always has been understood, and is not a matter
to arouse the susceptibilities of the states, all of which are
equally concerned in the question and equally on both sides.
Judgment reversed.
MR. JUSTICE WHITE, with whom concurs MR. JUSTICE HARLAN, MR.
JUSTICE McKENNA, and MR. JUSTICE DAY, dissenting:
Admonished that the considerations which control me are
presumptively faulty, as the Court holds them to be without merit,
yet so strong is my belief that the decision now made unduly
expends the due faith and credit clause of the Constitution, I
state the reasons for my dissent.
By law, the State of Mississippi prohibited certain forms of
gambling in futures, and inhibited its courts from giving effect to
any contract or dealing made in violation of the prohibitive
statute. In addition, it was made criminal to do any of the
forbidden acts. With the statutes in force, two citizens and
residents of Mississippi made contracts in that state which were
performed therein, and which were in violation of both the civil
and criminal statutes referred to. One of the parties asserting
that the other was indebted to him because of the contracts, both
parties, in the State of Mississippi, submitted their differences
to arbitration, and, on an award being made in that state, the one
in whose favor it was made sued in a state court in Mississippi to
recover thereon. In that suit, on the attention of the court being
called to the prohibited and criminal nature of the transactions,
the plaintiff dismissed the case. Subsequently, in a court of the
State of Missouri, the citizen of Mississippi, in whose favor the
award had been made, brought an action on the award and succeeded
in getting personal
Page 210 U. S. 239
service upon the other citizen of Mississippi, the latter being
temporarily in the State of Missouri. The action was put at issue.
Rejecting evidence offered by the defendant to show the nature of
the transactions, and that, under the laws of Mississippi, the same
were illegal and criminal, the Missouri court submitted the cause
to a jury with an instruction to find for the plaintiff if they
believed that the award had been made as alleged. A verdict and
judgment went in favor of the plaintiff. Thereupon the judgment so
obtained was assigned by the plaintiff to his attorney, who sued
upon the same in a court of Mississippi, where the facts upon which
the transaction depended were set up and the prohibitory statutes
of the state were pleaded as a defense. Ultimately the case went to
the Supreme Court of the State of Mississippi, where it was decided
that the Missouri judgment was not required, under the due faith
and credit clause, to be enforced in Mississippi, as it concerned
transactions which had taken place exclusively in Mississippi
between residents of that state, which were in violation of laws
embodying the public policy of that state, and to give effect to
which would be enforcing transactions which the courts of
Mississippi had no authority to enforce. The court now reverses on
the ground that the due faith and credit clause obliged the courts
of Mississippi, in consequence of the action of the Mississippi
court, to give efficacy to transactions in Mississippi which were
criminal, and which were against the public policy of that state.
Although not wishing in the slightest degree to weaken the
operation of the due faith and credit clause as interpreted and
applied from the beginning, it to me seems that this ruling so
enlarges that clause as to cause it to obliterate all state lines,
since the effect will be to endow each state with authority to
overthrow the public policy and criminal statutes of the others,
thereby depriving all of their lawful authority. Moreover, the
ruling now made, in my opinion, is contrary to the conceptions
which caused the due faith and credit clause to be placed in the
Constitution, and substantially overrules the previous decisions of
this Court
Page 210 U. S. 240
interpreting that clause. My purpose is to briefly state the
reasons which lead me to these conclusions.
The foundation upon which our system of government rests is the
possession by the states of the right, except as restricted by the
Constitution, to exert their police powers as they may deem best
for the happiness and welfare of those subject to their authority.
The whole theory upon which the Constitution was framed, and by
which alone, it seems to me, it can continue, is the recognition of
the fact that different conditions may exist in the different
states, rendering necessary the enactment of regulations of a
particular subject in one state when such subject may not in
another be deemed to require regulation; in other words, that in
Massachusetts, owing to conditions which may there prevail, the
legislature may deem it necessary to make police regulations on a
particular subject, although like regulations may not obtain in
other states. And, of course, such also may be the case in
Louisiana or any other state. If it be that the ruling now made
deprives the states of powers admittedly theirs, it follows that
the ruling must be wrong. The inquiry whether the ruling does so
becomes therefore directly pertinent not merely from considerations
of inconvenience, but as a matter of substantial demonstration. The
due faith and credit clause, it is now decided, means that
residents of a state may, within such state, do acts which are
violative of public policy, and yet that a judgment may be rendered
in another state giving effect to such transactions, which judgment
it becomes the duty of the state whose laws have been set at
defiance to enforce. It must follow, if one state, by the mere form
of a judgment, has this power, that no state has in effect the
authority to make police regulations -- or, what is tantamount to
the same thing, is without power to enforce them. If this be true,
the doctrine now upheld comes to this -- that no state, generally
speaking, possesses police power concerning acts done within its
borders if any of the results of such acts may be the subject of
civil actions, since the enforcement by the state of its police
Page 210 U. S. 241
regulations as to such acts may be nullified by an exertion of
the judicial power of another state. Indeed, the principle, as
understood by me, goes further than this, since it not only gives
to each of the states in the cases suggested the power to render
possible an evasion of the police laws of all the other states, but
it gives to each state the authority to compel the other states,
through their courts, to give effect to illegal transactions done
within their borders. It may not be denied that a state which has
lawfully prohibited the enforcement of a particular character of
transaction, and made the same criminal, has an interest in seeing
that its laws are enforced and will be subjected to the gravest
humiliation if it be compelled to give effect to acts done within
its borders which are in violation of its valid police or criminal
laws. And the consciousness of the enforced debasement to which it
would be subjected if compelled to enter a decree giving effect to
acts of residents of Mississippi, done within that state, which
were violative of the public policy of the state and which were
criminal, was clearly shown in the opinion of the supreme court of
the state in this case.
When the Constitution was adopted, the principles of comity by
which the decrees of the courts of one state were entitled to be
enforced in another were generally known, but the enforcement of
those principles by the several states had no absolute sanction,
since they rested but in comity. Now it cannot be denied that,
under the rules of comity recognized at the time of the adoption of
the Constitution and which at this time universally prevail, no
sovereignty was or is under the slightest moral obligation to give
effect to a judgment of a of another sovereignty when to do so
would compel the state in which the judgment was sought to be
executed to enforce an illegal and prohibited contract when both
the contract and all the acts done in connection with its
performance had taken place in the latter state. This seems to me
conclusive of this case, since, both in treatises of authoritative
writers (Story, Conflict of Law § 609) and by repeated
adjudications of
Page 210 U. S. 242
this Court, it has been settled that the purpose of the due
faith and credit clause was not to confer any new power, but simply
to make obligatory that duty which, when the Constitution was
adopted, rested, as has been said, in comity alone. Without citing
the numerous decisions which so hold, reference is made to a few of
the leading cases in which the prior rulings of this Court were
reviewed, the foregoing principle was stated, and the scope of the
due faith and credit clause was fully expounded:
Thompson
v. Whitman, 18 Wall. 457;
Wisconsin v. Pelican
Ins. Co., 127 U. S. 265;
Cole v. Cunningham, 133 U. S. 107;
Andrews v. Andrews, 188 U. S. 14. A
more particular review of those cases will demonstrate why my
conviction is that the decision in this case overrules the cases
cited.
In
Thompson v. Whitman, it was directly held that, when
a judgment of one state is presented for enforcement in another,
the due faith and credit clause does not deprive the courts of the
state in which it is sought to make the judgment effectual from
inquiring into the jurisdiction of the court in which the judgment
was rendered.
In
Wisconsin v. Pelican Ins. Co., a judgment was
rendered in Wisconsin against an insurance company for a large
amount of money. An original suit was brought in this Court upon
the judgment. Elaborately considering the authorities, it was held
that the due faith and credit clause did not deprive of the right
to go behind the face of the money judgment and ascertain the cause
of action upon which it had been rendered. In other words, it was
expressly decided that there was power to ascertain whether the
cause of action was such as to give the Wisconsin court
jurisdiction to render a judgment entitled to enforcement in other
states. This having been determined, as the proof established that
the judgment for money rendered in Wisconsin was for a penalty
imposed by the statutes of that state, it was held that the
judgment was not entitled to be enforced, because, when the
Constitution was framed, no state ever enforced the penal laws of
another state. Speaking of the grant of jurisdiction over
Page 210 U. S. 243
"controversies between a state and citizens of another state,"
it was said (p.
127 U. S.
289):
"The grant is of 'judicial power,' and was not intended to
confer upon the courts of the United States jurisdiction of a suit
or prosecution by the one state of such a nature that it could not,
on the settled principles of public and international law, be
entertained by the judiciary of the other state at all."
Certainly if such was the purpose of the framers in regard to
the clause referred to, a like purpose must have been intended with
reference to the due faith and credit clause. If a judgment for a
penalty in money rendered in one state may not be enforced in
another, by the same principles, a judgment rendered in one state
giving to the party the results of prohibited and criminal acts
done in another state is not entitled to be enforced in the state
whose laws have been violated.
Nor do I think that the ruling in the
Pelican case is
at all qualified by a sentence quoted in the opinion of the Court
now announced, taken from page
127 U. S. 293
of the report of the
Pelican case. On the contrary, when
that sentence is read in connection with its context, in my
opinion, it has a directly contrary effect to that for which it is
now cited. The passage in full is as follows, the sentence referred
to in the opinion in this case being the part embraced in brackets,
as found in the original:
"The essential nature and real foundation of a cause of action
are not changed by recovering judgment upon it, and the technical
rules which regard the original claim as merged in the judgment,
and the judgment as implying a promise by the defendant to pay it,
do not preclude a court to which a judgment is presented for
affirmative action [while it cannot go behind the judgment for the
purpose of examining into the validity of the claim] from
ascertaining whether the claim is really one of such a nature that
the court is authorized to enforce it."
It seems to me that the words "validity of the claim," used in
the sentence in brackets, but pointed out the absence of power,
when a judgment is one which is entitled to be enforced,
Page 210 U. S. 244
to relitigate the mere question of liability, and that the
language which follows the bracketed sentence, declaring that the
court is empowered "to ascertain whether the claim is really one of
such a nature that the court is entitled to enforce it," leaves no
room for the implication that the bracketed sentence was intended
to destroy the very doctrine upon which the decision in the
Pelican case was necessarily based, and without which the
decision must have been otherwise.
The decision in the
Pelican case has never been
overruled or qualified; on the contrary, that decision has been
affirmed and reaffirmed and approvingly cited in many cases. It was
expressly approved in the review which was made of the doctrine in
Cole v. Cunningham -- an instructive case on the power of
a state to restrain its citizens from prosecuting actions in other
jurisdictions when prosecuting such actions was a violation of the
laws of the State of the domicil. So also, the
Pelican
case was approvingly cited and commented upon in
Andrews v.
Andrews, supra, where the doctrine now under consideration was
involved. And the authoritative nature of the decision in the
Pelican case was recognized in
Anglo-Am. Prov. Co. v.
Davis Prov. Co., 191 U. S. 373.
None of the cases to which I have referred conflicts with the
opinion of Mr. Chief Justice Marshall in
Hampton v.
M'Connel, 3 Wheat. 234, since that case but
determined the degree of effect which was to be given to a judgment
which was entitled to be enforced, and therefore did not possibly
concern the question here presented. It is by me conceded that, if
the judgment whose enforcement is here in question is one which the
courts of Mississippi were bound to enforce under the due faith and
credit clause, the courts of that state are obliged to give to the
judgment, as declared by Chief Justice Marshall in
Hampton v.
M'Connel, the same effect and credit which it was entitled to
receive in the state where rendered. But, in my opinion, the
concession just stated does not in any way influence the question
here involved, which solely is whether the judgment was such an one
as to be entitled to any credit at all. In other
Page 210 U. S. 245
words, I do not see how the question whether a judgment is
without the due faith and credit clause may be controlled by a
decision pointing out the extent of the credit to be given to a
judgment if it be within that clause.
In addition to the considerations just stated, in my opinion,
this case is controlled by
Anglo-American Prov. Co. v. Davis
Prov. Co., No. 1, supra, cited in the opinion of the Court. In
that case, it was held that a judgment rendered in the State of
Illinois in favor of one corporation against another corporation,
both foreign to New York, was not entitled to be enforced in the
courts of New York under the due faith and credit clause, because
the statutes of New York enumerating the cases in which
jurisdiction might be exercised over actions between foreign
corporations did not give jurisdiction of such action as was before
the court. Now, in this case, in considering the very language
found in the statute here in question as contained in a prior
statute of the same nature, the supreme court of the state held
(
Lemonius v. Mayer, 71 Miss. 514),
"that, by the second section of the act of 1882, the
complainants were denied access to the courts of this state to
enforce their demand . . . for the money advanced for the purchase
of the 'futures' in cotton."
The want of power in the courts of Mississippi under the local
statute is therefore foreclosed in this Court by the construction
given to the statute by the state court of last resort. At all
events, that construction should not be departed from in order to
compel the courts of Mississippi to enforce obligations which took
origin in that state as the result of the intentional violation of
a prohibitory law manifesting the public policy of the state.
No special reference has been made by me to the arbitration,
because that is assumed by me to be negligible. If the cause of
action was open for inquiry for the purpose of deciding whether the
Missouri court had jurisdiction to render a judgment entitled to be
enforced in another state, the arbitration is of no consequence.
The violation of law in Mississippi could not be cured by seeking
to arbitrate in that state in order to fix
Page 210 U. S. 246
the sum of the fruits of the illegal acts. The ancient maxims
that something cannot be made out of nothing, and that which is
void for reasons of public policy cannot be made valid by
confirmation or acquiescence, seem to my mind decisive.
I therefore dissent.