SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
V. L. v. E. L., et al.
on petition for writ of certiorari to the supreme court of
alabama
No. 15–648 Decided March 7, 2016
Per Curiam.
A Georgia court entered a final judgment of adoption making
petitioner V. L. a legal parent of the children that she and
respondent E. L. had raised together from birth. V. L.
and E. L. later separated while living in Alabama. V. L.
asked the Alabama courts to enforce the Georgia judgment and grant
her custody or visitation rights. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled
against her, holding that the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the
United States Constitution does not require the Alabama courts to
respect the Georgia judgment. That judgment of the Alabama Supreme
Court is now reversed by this summary disposition.
I
V. L. and E. L. are two women who were in a
relationship from approximately 1995 until 2011. Through assisted
reproductive technology, E. L. gave birth to a child named
S. L. in 2002 and to twins named N. L. and H. L. in
2004. After the children were born, V. L. and E. L.
raised them together as joint parents.
V. L. and E. L. eventually decided to give legal
status to the relationship between V. L. and the children by
having V. L. formally adopt them. To facilitate the adoption,
the couple rented a house in Alpharetta, Georgia. V. L. then
filed an adoption petition in the Superior Court of Fulton County,
Georgia. E. L. also appeared in that proceeding. While not
relinquishing her own parental rights, she gave her express consent
to V. L.’s adoption of the children as a second parent. The
Georgia court determined that V. L. had complied with the
applicable requirements of Georgia law, and entered a final decree
of adoption allowing V. L. to adopt the children and
recognizing both V. L. and E. L. as their legal
parents.
V. L. and E. L. ended their relationship in 2011,
while living in Alabama, and V. L. moved out of the house that
the couple had shared. V. L. later filed a petition in the
Circuit Court of Jefferson County, Alabama, alleging that
E. L. had denied her access to the children and interfered
with her ability to exercise her parental rights. She asked the
Alabama court to register the Georgia adoption judgment and award
her some measure of custody or visitation rights. The matter was
transferred to the Family Court of Jefferson County. That court
entered an order awarding V. L. scheduled visitation with the
children.
E. L. appealed the visitation order to the Alabama Court of
Civil Appeals. She argued, among other points, that the Alabama
courts should not recognize the Georgia judgment because the
Georgia court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction to enter it. The
Court of Civil Appeals rejected that argument. It held, however,
that the Alabama family court had erred by failing to conduct an
evidentiary hearing before awarding V. L. visitation rights,
and so it remanded for the family court to conduct that
hearing.
The Alabama Supreme Court reversed. It held that the Georgia
court had no subject-matter jurisdiction under Georgia law to enter
a judgment allowing V. L. to adopt the children while still
recognizing E. L.’s parental rights. As a consequence, the
Alabama Supreme Court held Alabama courts were not required to
accord full faith and credit to the Georgia judgment.
II
The Constitution provides that “Full Faith and Credit shall be
given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial
Proceedings of every other State.” U. S. Const., Art. IV, §1.
That Clause requires each State to recognize and give effect to
valid judgments rendered by the courts of its sister States. It
serves “to alter the status of the several states as independent
foreign sovereignties, each free to ignore obligations created
under the laws or by the judicial proceedings of the others, and to
make them integral parts of a single nation.” Milwaukee
County v. M. E. White Co., 296 U. S. 268,277
(1935).
With respect to judgments, “the full faith and credit obligation
is exacting.” Baker v. General Motors Corp., 522
U. S. 222, 233 (1998). “A final judgment in one State, if
rendered by a court with adjudicatory authority over the subject
matter and persons governed by the judgment, qualifies for
recognition throughout the land.” Ibid. A State may not
disregard the judgment of a sister State because it disagrees with
the reasoning underlying the judgment or deems it to be wrong on
the merits. On the contrary, “the full faith and credit clause of
the Constitution precludes any inquiry into the merits of the cause
of action, the logic or consistency of the decision, or the
validity of the legal principles on which the judgment is based.”
Milliken v. Meyer, 311 U. S. 457,462 (1940).
A State is not required, however, to afford full faith and
credit to a judgment rendered by a court that “did not have
jurisdiction over the subject matter or the relevant parties.”
Underwriters Nat. Assurance Co. v. North Carolina Life
& Accident & Health Ins. Guaranty Assn.,455 U. S.
691, 705 (1982). “Consequently, before a court is bound by [a]
judgment rendered in another State, it may inquire into the
jurisdictional basis of the foreign court’s decree.” Ibid.
That jurisdictional inquiry, however, is a limited one. “[I]f the
judgment on its face appears to be a ‘record of a court of general
jurisdiction, such jurisdiction over the cause and the parties is
to be presumed unless disproved by extrinsic evidence, or by the
record itself.’ ” Milliken, supra, at 462
(quoting Adam v. Saenger, 303 U. S. 59,62
(1938)).
Those principles resolve this case. Under Georgia law, as
relevant here, “[t]he superior courts of the several counties shall
have exclusive jurisdiction in all matters of adoption.” Ga. Code
Ann. §19–8–2(a) (2015). That provision on its face gave the Georgia
Superior Court subject-matter jurisdiction to hear and decide the
adoption petition at issue here. The Superior Court resolved that
matter by entering a final judgment that made V. L. the legal
adoptive parent of the children. Whatever the merits of that
judgment, it was within the statutory grant of jurisdiction over
“all matters of adoption.” Ibid. The Georgia court thus had
the “adjudicatory authority over the subject matter” required to
entitle its judgment to full faith and credit. Baker,
supra, at 233.
The Alabama Supreme Court reached a different result by relying
on Ga. Code Ann. §19–8–5(a). That statute states (as relevant here)
that “a child who has any living parent or guardian may be adopted
by a third party . . . only if each such living parent and each
such guardian has voluntarily and in writing surrendered all of his
or her rights to such child.” The Alabama Supreme Court concluded
that this provision prohibited the Georgia Superior Court from
allowing V. L. to adopt the children while also allowing
E. L. to keep her existing parental rights. It further
concluded that this provision went not to the merits but to the
Georgia court’s subject-matter jurisdiction. In reaching that
crucial second conclusion, the Alabama Supreme Court seems to have
relied solely on the fact that the right to adoption under Georgia
law is purely statutory, and “ ‘[t]he requirements of
Georgia’s adoptions statutes are mandatory and must be strictly
construed in favor of the natural parents.’ ” App. to Pet. for
Cert. 23a–24a (quoting In re Marks, 300 Ga. App. 239,
243, 684 S. E. 2d 364, 367 (2009)).
That analysis is not consistent with this Court’s controlling
precedent. Where a judgment indicates on its face that it was
rendered by a court of competent jurisdiction, such jurisdiction
“ ‘is to be presumed unless disproved.’ ”
Milliken, supra, at 462 (quoting Adam,
supra, at 62). There is nothing here to rebut that
presumption. The Georgia statute on which the Alabama Supreme Court
relied, Ga. Code Ann. §19–8–5(a), does not speak in jurisdictional
terms; for instance, it does not say that a Georgia court “shall
have jurisdiction to enter an adoption decree” only if each
existing parent or guardian has surrendered his or her parental
rights. Neither the Georgia Supreme Court nor any Georgia appellate
court, moreover, has construed §19–8–5(a) as jurisdictional. That
construction would also be difficult to reconcile with Georgia law.
Georgia recognizes that in general, subject-matter jurisdiction
addresses “whether a court has jurisdiction to decide a particular
class of cases,” Goodrum v. Goodrum, 283 Ga. 163, 657
S. E. 2d 192 (2008), not whether a court should grant relief
in any given case. Unlike §19–8–2(a), which expressly gives Georgia
superior courts “exclusive jurisdiction in all matters of
adoption,” §19–8–5(a) does not speak to whether a court has the
power to decide a general class of cases. It only provides a rule
of decision to apply in determining if a particular adoption should
be allowed.
Section 19–8–5(a) does not become jurisdictional just because it
is “ ‘mandatory’ ” and “ ‘must be strictly
construed.’ ” App. to Pet. for Cert. 23a–24a (quoting
Marks, supra, at 243, 684 S. E. 2d, at 367).
This Court “has long rejected the notion that all mandatory
prescriptions, however emphatic, are properly typed
jurisdictional.” Gonzalez v. Thaler, 565 U. S.
134, ___ (2012) (slip op., at 10–11) (internal quotation marks and
ellipsis omitted). Indeed, the Alabama Supreme Court’s reasoning
would give jurisdictional status to every requirement of the
Georgia adoption statutes, since Georgia law indicates those
requirements are all mandatory and must be strictly construed.
Marks, supra, at 243, 684 S. E. 2d, at 367. That
result would comport neither with Georgia law nor with common
sense.
As Justice Holmes observed more than a century ago, “it
sometimes may be difficult to decide whether certain words in a
statute are directed to jurisdiction or to merits.”
Fauntleroy v. Lum, 210 U. S. 230–235 (1908). In
such cases, especially where the Full Faith and Credit Clause is
concerned, a court must be “slow to read ambiguous words, as
meaning to leave the judgment open to dispute, or as intended to do
more than fix the rule by which the court should decide.”
Id., at 235. That time-honored rule controls here. The
Georgia judgment appears on its face to have been issued by a court
with jurisdiction, and there is no established Georgia law to the
contrary. It follows that the Alabama Supreme Court erred in
refusing to grant that judgment full faith and credit.
The petition for writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment of
the Alabama Supreme Court is reversed, and the case is remanded for
further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
