This, however, was only the beginning of the Court’s law-making 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 State. By the almost universally accepted view prior to 1906, a proceeding in divorce was one against the marriage status, i.e., in rem, and hence might be validly brought by either party in any State where he or she was bona fide domiciled;47 and, conversely, when the plaintiff did not have a bona fide domicile in the State, a court could not render a decree binding in other States even if the nonresident defendant entered a personal appearance.48
47 Cheever v. Wilson, 76 U.S. (9 Wall.) 108 (1870).
48 Andrews v. Andrews, 188 U.S. 14 (1903). See also German Savings Soc'y v. Dormitzer, 192 U.S. 125 (1904).
Divorce Suit: In Rem or in Personam; Judicial Indecision.—In 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 personam. In the former it was held, in the latter denied, that a divorce granted a husband without personal service upon the wife, who at the time was residing in another State, was entitled to recognition under the Full Faith and Credit Clause and the acts of Congress; the difference between the cases consisted solely in the fact that in the Atherton case the husband had driven the wife from their joint home by his conduct, while in the Haddock case he had deserted her. The court which granted the divorce in Atherton v. Atherton was held to have had jurisdiction of the marriage status, with the result that the proceeding was one in rem and hence required only service by publication upon the respondent. Haddock’s suit, on the contrary, was held to be as to the wife in personam and so to require personal service upon her or her voluntary appearance, neither of which had been had; although, notwithstanding this, the decree in the latter case was held to be valid in the State where obtained because of the State’s inherent power to determine the status of its own citizens. The upshot was a situation in which a man and a woman, when both were in Connecticut, were divorced; when both were in New York, were married; and when the one was in Connecticut and the other in New York, the former was divorced and the latter married. In Atherton v. Atherton the Court had earlier acknowledged that “a husband without a wife, or a wife without a husband, is unknown to the law.”
The practical difficulties and distresses likely to result from such anomalies were pointed out by critics of the decision at the time. In point of fact, they have been largely avoided, because most of the state courts have continued to give judicial recognition and full faith and credit to one another’s divorce proceedings on the basis of the older idea that a divorce proceeding is one in rem, and that if the applicant is bona fide domiciled in the State the court has jurisdiction in this respect. Moreover, until the second of the Williams v. North Carolina cases51 was decided in 1945, there had not been manifested the slightest disposition to challenge judicially the power of the States to determine what shall constitute domicile for divorce purposes. Shortly prior thereto, the Court in Davis v. Davis52 rejected contentions adverse to the validity of a Virginia decree of which enforcement was sought in the District of Columbia. In this case, a husband, after having obtained in the District a decree of separation subject to payment of alimony, established years later a residence in Virginia and sued there for a divorce. Personally served in the District, where she continued to reside, the wife filed a plea denying that her husband was a resident of Virginia and averred that he was guilty of a fraud on the court in seeking to establish a residence for purposes of jurisdiction. In ruling that the Virginia decree, granting to the husband an absolute divorce minus any alimony payment, was enforceable in the District, the Court stated that in view of the wife’s failure, while in Virginia litigating her husband’s status to sue, to answer the husband’s charges of willful desertion, it would be unreasonable to hold that the husband’s domicile in Virginia was not sufficient to entitle him to a divorce effective in the District. The finding of the Virginia court on domicile and jurisdiction was declared to bind the wife. Davis v. Davis is distinguishable from the Williams v. North Carolina decisions in that in the former determination of the jurisdictional prerequisite of domicile was made in a contested proceeding while in the Williams cases it was not.
49 181 U.S. 155, 162 (1901).
50 201 U.S. 562 (1906).
51 317 U.S. 287 (1942); 325 U.S. 226 (1945).
52 305 U.S. 32 (1938).
Williams I and Williams II.—In the Williams I and Williams II cases, 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 for bigamy, the defendants relied upon their Nevada decrees and won the preliminary round of this litigation, that is, in Williams I,53 when a majority of the Justices, overruling Haddock v. Haddock, declaring that in this case, the Court must assume that the petitioners for divorce had a bona fide domicile in Nevada and not that their Nevada domicile was a sham. “[E]ach State, by virtue of its command over the domiciliaries and its large interest in the institution of marriage, can alter within its own borders the marriage status of the spouse domiciled there, even though the other spouse is absent. There is no constitutional barrier if the form and nature of substituted service meet the requirements of due process.” Accordingly, a decree granted by Nevada to one, who, it is assumed, is at the time bona fide domiciled therein, is binding upon the courts of other States, including North Carolina in which the marriage was performed and where the other party to the marriage is still domiciled when the divorce was decreed. In view of its assumptions, which it justified on the basis of an inadequate record, the Court did not here pass upon the question whether North Carolina had the power to refuse full faith and credit to a Nevada decree because it was based on residence rather than domicile or because, contrary to the findings of the Nevada court, North Carolina found that no bona fide domicile had been acquired in Nevada.54
53 317 U.S. 287, 298-299 (1942).
54 Id. at 302.
Presaging what ruling the Court would make when it did get around to passing upon the latter question, Justice Jackson, dissenting in Williams I, protested that “this decision repeals the divorce laws of all the States and substitutes the law of Nevada as to all marriages one of the parties to which can afford a short trip there.... While a State can no doubt set up its own standards of domicile as to its internal concerns, I do not think it can require us to accept and in the name of the Constitution impose them on other States.... The effect of the Court’s decision today—that we must give extra-territorial effect to any judgment that a state honors for its own purposes—is to deprive this Court of control over the operation of the full faith and credit and the due process clauses of the Federal Constitution in cases of contested jurisdiction and to vest it in the first State to pass on the facts necessary to jurisdiction.”55
Notwithstanding that one of the deserted spouses had died since the initial trial and that another had remarried, North Carolina, without calling into question the status of the latter marriage, began a new prosecution for bigamy; when the defendants appealed the conviction resulting therefrom, the Supreme Court, in Williams II,56 sustained the adjudication of guilt as not denying full faith and credit to the Nevada divorce decree. Reiterating the doctrine that jurisdiction to grant divorce is founded on domicile,57 a majority of the Court held that a decree of divorce rendered in one State may be collaterally impeached in another by proof that the court which rendered the decree lacked jurisdiction (the parties not having been domiciled therein), even though the record of proceedings in that court purports to show jurisdiction.58
55 Id. at 311.
56 325 U.S. 226, 229 (1945).
57 Bell v. Bell, 181 U.S. 175 (1901); Andrews v. Andrews, 188 U.S. 14 (1903).
58 Strong dissents were filed which have influenced subsequent holdings. Among these was that of Justice Rutledge which attacked both the consequences of the decision as well as the concept of jurisdictional domicile on which it was founded.
“Unless ‘matrimonial domicil,’ banished in Williams I [by the overruling of Haddock v. Haddock], has returned renamed ['domicil of origin'] in Williams II, every decree becomes vulnerable in every State. Every divorce, wherever granted . . . may now be reexamined by every other State, upon the same or different evidence, to redetermine the ‘jurisdiction fact,’ always the ultimate conclusion of ‘domicil.’ . . .”
“The Constitution does not mention domicil. Nowhere does it posit the powers of the states or the nation upon that amorphous, highly variable common law conception.... No legal conception, save possibly ‘jurisdiction’ . . . afford such possibilities for uncertain application.... Apart from the necessity for travel, [to effect a change of domicile, the latter], criterion comes down to a purely subjective mental state, related to remaining for a length of time never yet defined with clarity. ... When what must be proved is a variable, the proof and the conclusion which follows upon it inevitably take on that character.... [The majority have not held] that denial of credit will be allowed, only if the evidence [as to the place of domicile] is different or depending in any way upon the character or the weight of the difference. The test is not different evidence. It is evidence, whether the same or different and, if different, without regard to the quality of the difference, from which an opposing set of inferences can be drawn by the trier of fact ‘not unreasonably.’ ... But . . . [the Court] does not define ‘not unreasonably.’ It vaguely suggests a supervisory function, to be exercised when the denial [of credit] strikes its sensibilities as wrong, by some not stated standard.... There will be no ‘weighing’ [of evidence], ... only examination for sufficiency.” 325 U.S. at 248, 251, 255, 258-259.
No less disposed to prophesy undesirable results from this decision was Justice Black in whose dissenting opinion Justice Douglas concurred.
“The Full Faith and Credit Clause, as now interpreted, has become a disrupting influence. The Court in effect states that the clause does not apply to divorce actions, and that States alone have the right to determine what effect shall be given to the decrees of other States. If the Court is abandoning the principle that a marriage [valid where made is valid everywhere], a consequence is to subject people to bigamy or adultery prosecutions because they exercise their constitutional right to pass from a State in which they were validly married on to another which refuses to recognize their marriage. Such a consequence violates basic guarantees.” Id. at 262.
Cases Following Williams II.—Fears registered by the dissenters in the second Williams case that the stability of all divorces might be undermined thereby and that thereafter the court of each forum State, by its own independent determination of domicile, might refuse recognition of foreign decrees were temporarily set at rest by the holding in Sherrer v. Sherrer,59 wherein Massachusetts, a State of domiciliary origin, was required to accord full faith and credit to a 90-day Florida decree which had been contested by the husband. The latter, upon receiving notice by mail, retained Florida counsel who entered a general appearance and denied all allegations in the complaint, including the wife’s residence. At the hearing, the husband, though present in person and by counsel, did not offer evidence in rebuttal of the wife’s proof of her Florida residence, and when the Florida court ruled that she was a bona fide resident, the husband did not appeal. Inasmuch as the findings of the requisite jurisdictional facts, unlike those in the second Williams case, were made in proceedings in which the defendant appeared and participated, the requirements of full faith and credit were held to bar him from collaterally attacking such findings in a suit instituted by him in his home State of Massachusetts, particularly in the absence of proof that the divorce decree was subject to such collateral attack in a Florida court. Having failed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded him by his appearance in the Florida proceeding, the husband was thereafter precluded from relitigating in another State the issue of his wife’s domicile already passed upon by the Florida court.
59 334 U.S. 343 (1948).
In Coe v. Coe,60 embracing a similar set of facts, the Court applied like reasoning to reach a similar result. Massachusetts again was compelled to recognize the validity of a six-week Nevada decree obtained by a husband who had left Massachusetts after a court of that State had refused him a divorce and had granted his wife separate support. In the Nevada proceeding, the wife appeared personally and by counsel filed a cross-complaint for divorce, admitted the husband’s residence, and participated personally in the proceedings. After finding that it had jurisdiction of the plaintiff, defendant, and the subject matter involved, the Nevada court granted the wife a divorce, which was valid, final, and not subject to collateral attack under Nevada law. The husband married again, and on his return to Massachusetts, his ex-wife petitioned the Massachusetts court to adjudge him in contempt for failing to make payments for her separate support under the earlier Massachusetts decree. Inasmuch as there was no intimation that under Massachusetts law a decree of separate support would survive a divorce, recognition of the Nevada decree as valid accordingly necessitated a rejection of the ex-wife’s contention.
Appearing to review Williams II, and significant for the social consequences produced by the result decreed therein, is the case of Rice v. Rice.61 To determine the widowhood status of the party litigants in relation to inheritance of property of a husband who had deserted his first wife in Connecticut, had obtained an ex parte divorce in Nevada, and after remarriage, had died without ever returning to Connecticut, the first wife, joining the second wife and the administrator of his estate as defendants, petitioned a Connecticut court for a declaratory judgment. After having placed upon the first wife the burden of proving that the decedent had not acquired a bona fide domicile in Nevada, and after giving proper weight to the claims of power by the Nevada court, the Connecticut court concluded that the evidence sustained the contentions of the first wife, and in so doing, it was upheld by the Supreme Court. The cases of Sherrer v. Sherrer, and Coe v. Coe, previously discussed, were declared not to be in point, inasmuch as no personal service was made upon the first wife, nor did she in any way participate in the Nevada proceedings. She was not, therefore, precluded from challenging the findings of the Nevada court that the decedent was, at the time of the divorce, domiciled in that State.62
60 334 U.S. 378 (1948). In a dissenting opinion filed in the case of Sherrer v. Sherrer, but applicable also to the case of Coe v. Coe, Justice Frankfurter, with Justice Murphy concurring, asserted his inability to accept the proposition advanced by the majority that “regardless of how overwhelming the evidence may have been that the asserted domicile in the State offering bargain-counter divorces was a sham, the home State of the parties is not permitted to question the matter if the form of a controversy had been gone through.” 334 U.S. at 343, 377.
61 336 U.S. 674 (1949). Of four justices dissenting, Black, Douglas, Rutledge, and Jackson, Justice Jackson alone filed a written opinion. To him the decision was “an example of the manner in which, in the law of domestic relations, ‘confusion now hath made his masterpiece,’ but for the first Williams case and its progeny, the judgment of the Connecticut court might properly have held that the Rice divorce decree was void for every purpose because it was rendered by a State court which never obtained jurisdiction of the nonresident defendant. But if we adhere to the holdings that the Nevada court had power over her for the purpose of blasting her marriage and opening the way to a successor, I do not see the justice of inventing a compensating confusion in the device of divisible divorce by which the parties are half-bound and half-free and which permits Rice to have a wife who cannot become his widow and to leave a widow who was no longer his wife.” Id. at 676, 679, 680.
62 Vermont violated the clause in sustaining a collateral attack on a Florida divorce decree, the presumption of Florida’s jurisdiction over the cause and the parties not having been overcome by extrinsic evidence or the record of the case. Cook v. Cook, 342 U.S. 126 (1951). The Sherrer and Coe cases were relied upon. There seems, therefore, to be no doubt of their continued vitality.
A Florida divorce decree was also at the bottom of another case in which the daughter of a divorced man by his first wife and his legatee under his will sought to attack his divorce in the New York courts and thereby indirectly his third marriage. The Court held that inasmuch as the attack would not have been permitted in Florida under the doctrine of res judicata, it was not permissible under the Full Faith and Credit Clause in New York. On the whole, it appears that the principle of res judicata is slowly winning out against the principle of domicile. Johnson v. Muelberger, 340 U.S. 581 (1951).
Claims for Alimony or Property in Forum State.—In 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 bona fide domicile in the latter State. In this instance, the husband and wife had separated in Pennsylvania, where the wife was granted a support order; after two unsuccessful attempts to win a divorce in that State, the husband departed for Nevada. Upon the receipt of a Nevada decree, the husband thereafter established a residence in Ohio and filed an action in Pennsylvania for total relief from the support order. In a concurring opinion, in which he was joined by Justices Black and Rutledge, Justice Douglas stressed the “basic difference between the problem of marital capacity and the problem of support,” and stated that it was “not apparent that the spouse who obtained the decree can defeat an action for maintenance or support in another State by showing that he was domiciled in the State which awarded him the divorce decree,” unless the other spouse appeared or was personally served. “The State where the deserted wife is domiciled has a concern in the welfare of the family deserted by the head of the household. If he is required to support his former wife, he is not made a bigamist and the offspring of his second marriage are not bastardized.” Or, as succinctly stated by Justice Rutledge, “the jurisdictional foundation for a decree in one State capable of foreclosing an action for maintenance or support in another may be different from that required to alter the marital status with extraterritorial effect.”64
63 325 U.S. 279 (1945).
64 Id. at 281-283.
Three years later, but on this occasion as spokesman for a majority of the Court, Justice Douglas reiterated these views in the case of Estin v. Estin.65 Even though it acknowledged the validity of an ex parte Nevada decree obtained by a husband, New York was held not to have denied full faith and credit to the decree when, subsequently thereto, it granted the wife a judgment for arrears in alimony founded upon a decree of separation previously awarded to her when both she and her husband after he had resided there a year and upon constructive notice to the wife in New York who entered no appearance, was held to be effective only to change the marital status of both parties in all States of the Union but ineffective on the issue of alimony. Divorce, in other words, was viewed as being divisible; Nevada, in the absence of acquiring jurisdiction over the wife, was held incapable of adjudicating the rights of the wife in the prior New York judgment awarding her alimony. Accordingly, the Nevada decree could not prevent New York from applying its own rule of law which, unlike that of Pennsylvania,66 does permit a support order to survive a divorce decree.67
Such a result was justified as accommodating the interests of both New York and Nevada in the broken marriage by restricting each State to matters of her dominant concern, the concern of New York being that of protecting the abandoned wife against impoverishment. In Simons v. Miami National Bank,68 the Court held that a dower right in the deceased husband’s estate is extinguished even though a divorce decree was obtained in a proceeding in which the nonresident wife was served by publication only and did not make a personal appearance.69 The Court found the principle of Estin v. Estin70 was not applicable. In Simons, the Court rejected the contention that the forum court, in giving recognition to the foreign court’s separation decree providing for maintenance and support, has to allow for dower rights in the deceased husband’s estate in the forum State.71 Full faith and credit is not denied to a sister State’s separation decree, including an award of monthly alimony, where nothing in the foreign State’s separation decree could be construed as creating or preserving any interest in the nature of or in lieu of dower in any property of the decedent, wherever located and where the law of the forum State did not treat such a decree as having such effect nor indicate such an effect irrespective of the existence of the foreign State’s decree.72
65 334 U.S. 541 (1948). See also the companion case of Kreiger v. Kreiger, 334 U.S. 555 (1948).
66 Esenwein v. Commonwealth, 325 U.S. 279, 280 (1945).
67 Because the record, in his opinion, did not make it clear whether New York “law” held that no “ex parte” divorce decree could terminate a prior New York separate maintenance decree, or merely that no “ex parte” decree of divorce of another State could, Justice Frankfurter dissented and recommended that the case be remanded for clarification. Justice Jackson dissented on the ground that under New York law, a New York divorce would terminate the wife’s right to alimony, and if the Nevada decree is good, it was entitled to no less effect in New York than a local decree. However, for reasons stated in his dissent in the first Williams case, 317 U.S. 287, he would have preferred not to give standing to constructive service divorces obtained on short residence. 334 U.S. 541, 549-554 (1948). These two Justices filed similar dissents in the companion case of Kreiger v. Kreiger, 334 U.S. 555, 557 (1948).
68 381 U.S. 81 (1965).
69 Id. at 84-85.
70 334 U.S. 541 (1948).
71 381 U.S. at 84-85.
72 Id. at 85.
Decrees Awarding Alimony, Custody of Children.—Resulting as a by-product 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 when extrastate enforcement is sought for them. Thus, a judgment in State A for alimony in arrears and payable under a prior judgment of separation which is not by its terms conditional nor subject by the law of State A to modification or recall, and on which execution was directed to issue, is entitled to recognition in the forum State. Although an obligation for accrued alimony could have been modified or set aside in State A prior to its merger in the judgment, such a judgment, by the law of State A, is not lacking in finality.73 As to the finality of alimony decrees in general, the Court had previously ruled that where such a decree is rendered, payable in future installments, the right to such installments becomes absolute and vested on becoming due, provided no modification of the decree has been made prior to the maturity of the installments.74 However, a judicial order requiring the payment of arrearages in alimony, which exceeded the alimony previously decreed, is invalid for want of due process, the respondent having been given no opportunity to contest it.75 “A judgment obtained in violation of procedural due process,” said Chief Justice Stone, “is not entitled to full faith and credit when sued upon in another jurisdiction.”76
73 Barber v. Barber, 323 U.S. 77, 84 (1944).
74 Sistare v. Sistare, 218 U.S. 1, 11 (1910). See also Barber v. Barber, 62 U.S. (21 How.) 582 (1859); Lynde v. Lynde, 181 U.S. 183, 186-187 (1901); Audubon v. Shufeldt, 181 U.S. 575, 577 (1901); Bates v. Bodie, 245 U.S. 520 (1918); Yarborough v. Yarborough, 290 U.S. 202 (1933); Loughran v. Loughran, 292 U.S. 216 (1934).
75 Griffin v. Griffin, 327 U.S. 220 (1946).
76 Id. at 228. An alimony case of a quite extraordinary pattern was that of Sutton v. Leib, 342 U.S. 402 (1952). Because of the diverse citizenship of the parties, who had once been husband and wife, the case was brought by the latter in a federal court in Illinois. Her suit was to recover unpaid alimony which was to continue until her remarriage. To be sure, she had, as she confessed, remarried in Nevada, but the marriage had been annulled in New York on the ground that the man was already married, inasmuch as his divorce from his previous wife was null and void, she having neither entered a personal appearance nor been personally served. The Court, speaking by Justice Reed, held that the New York annulment of the Nevada marriage must be given full faith and credit in Illinois but left Illinois to decide for itself the effect of the annulment upon the obligations of petitioner’s first husband.
An example of a custody case was one involving a Florida divorce decree which was granted ex parte to a wife who had left her husband in New York, where he was served by publication. The decree carried with it an award of the exclusive custody of the child, whom the day before the husband had secretly seized and brought back to New York. The Court ruled that the decree was adequately honored by a New York court when, in habeas corpus proceedings, it gave the father rights of visitation and custody of the child during stated periods and exacted a surety bond of the wife conditioned on her delivery of the child to the father at the proper times,77 it having not been “shown that the New York court in modifying the Florida decree exceeded the limits permitted under Florida laws. There is therefore a failure of proof that the Florida decree received less credit in New York than it had in Florida.”
Answering a question left open in the preceding holding as to the binding effect of the ex parte award, the Court more recently acknowledged that in a proceeding challenging a mother’s right to retain custody of her children, a State is not required to give effect to the decree of another State’s court, which never acquired personal jurisdiction over the mother of her children, and which awarded custody to the father as the result of an ex parte divorce action instituted by him.78 In Kovacs v. Brewer,79 however, the Court indicated that a finding of changed circumstances rendering observance of an absentee foreign custody decree inimical to the best interests of the child is essential to sustain the validity of the forum court’s refusal to enforce a foreign decree, rendered with jurisdiction over all the parties but the child, and revising an initial decree by transferring custody from the paternal grandfather to the mother. However, when, as is true in Virginia, agreements by parents as to shared custody of a child do not bind the State’s courts, the dismissal by a Virginia court of a habeas corpus petition instituted by a father to obtain custody was not res judicata in that State; therefore, even if the Full Faith and Credit Clause were applicable to child custody decrees, it would not require a South Carolina court, in a custody suit instituted by the wife, to recognize a court order not binding in Virginia.80
77 Halvey v. Halvey, 330 U.S. 610, 615 (1947).
78 May v. Anderson, 345 U.S. 528 (1953). Justices Jackson, Reed, and Minton dissented.
79 356 U.S. 604 (1958). Rejecting the implication that recognition must be accorded unless the circumstances have changed, Justice Frankfurter dissented on the ground that in determining what is best for the welfare of the child, the forum court cannot be bound by an absentee, foreign custody decree, “irrespective of whether changes in circumstances are objectively provable.”
80 Ford v. Ford, 371 U.S. 187, 192-194 (1962). As part of a law dealing with parental kidnapping, Congress, in Pub. L. 96-611, 8(a), 94 Stat. 3569, 28 U.S.C. § 1738A, required States to give full faith and credit to state court custody decrees provided the original court had jurisdiction and is the home State of the child.
Status of the Law.—The doctrine of divisible divorce, as developed by Justice Douglas in Estin v. Estin,81 may have become the prevailing standard for determining the enforceability of foreign divorce decrees. If such be the case, it may be tenable to assert that an ex parte divorce, founded upon acquisition of domicile by one spouse in the State which granted it, is effective to destroy the marital status of both parties in the State of domiciliary origin and probably in all other States. The effect is to preclude subsequent prosecutions for bigamy but not to alter rights as to property, alimony, or custody of children in the State of domiciliary origin of a spouse who neither was served nor appeared personally.
In any event the accuracy of these conclusions has not been impaired by any decision rendered by the Court since 1948. Thus, in Armstrong v. Armstrong,82 an ex parte divorce decree obtained by the husband in Florida was deemed to have been adequately recognized by an Ohio court when, with both of the parties before it, it disposed of the wife’s suit for divorce and alimony with a decree limited solely to an award of alimony.83 Similarly, a New York court was held not bound by an ex parte Nevada divorce decree, rendered without personal jurisdiction over the wife, to the extent that it relieved the husband of all marital obligations, and in an ex parte action for separation and alimony instituted by the wife, it was competent to sequester the husband’s property in New York to satisfy his obligations to the wife.84
81 334 U.S. 541 (1948).
82 350 U.S. 568 (1956).
83 Four Justices, Black, Douglas, Clark, and Chief Justice Warren, disputed the Court’s contention that the Florida decree contained no ruling on the wife’s entitlement to alimony and mentioned that for want of personal jurisdiction over the wife, the Florida court was not competent to dispose of that issue. Id. at 575
84 Vanderbilt v. Vanderbilt, 354 U.S. 416 (1957). Two Justices dissented. Justice Frankfurter was unable to perceive “why dissolution of the marital relation is not so personal as to require personal jurisdiction over the absent spouse, while the denial of alimony . . . is.” Justice Harlan maintained that inasmuch as the wife did not become a domiciliary of New York until after the Nevada decree, she had no pre-divorce rights in New York which the latter was obligated to protect.
Last modified: June 9, 2014