Opinion ID: 103736
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: lack of due process of law.

Text: Thirty-seven years ago this Court decided that a state court, even of the plaintiff's domicile, could not render a judgment of divorce that would be entitled to federal enforcement in other states against a nonresident who did not appear, and was not personally served with process. Haddock v. Haddock, 201 U.S. 562 (1905 Term). The opinion was much criticized, particularly in academic circles. [1] Until today, however, it has been regarded as law, to be accepted and applied, for good or ill, depending on one's view of the matter. The theoretical reasons for the change are not convincing. The opinion concedes that Nevada's judgment could not be forced upon North Carolina in absence of personal service if a divorce proceeding were an action in personam. In other words, settled family relationships may be destroyed by a procedure that we would not recognize if the suit were one to collect a grocery bill. [2] We have been told that this is because divorce is a proceeding in rem. The marriage relation is to be reified and treated as a res. Then it seems that this res follows a fugitive from matrimony into a state of easy divorce, although the other party to it remains at home where the res was contracted and where years of cohabitation would seem to give it local situs. Would it be less logical to hold that the continued presence of one party to a marriage gives North Carolina power to protect the res, the marriage relation, than to hold that the transitory presence of one gives Nevada power to destroy it? Counsel at the bar met this dilemma by suggesting that the res exists in duplicate  one for each party to the marriage. But this seems fatal to the decree, for if that is true the dissolution of the res in transit would hardly operate to dissolve the res that stayed in North Carolina. Of course this discussion is only to reveal the artificial and fictional character of the whole doctrine of a res as applied to a divorce action. I doubt that it promotes clarity of thinking to deal with marriage in terms of a res, like a piece of land or a chattel. It might be more helpful to think of marriage as just marriage  a relationship out of which spring duties to both spouse and society and from which are derived rights,  such as the right to society and services and to conjugal love and affection  rights which generally prove to be either priceless or worthless, but which none the less the law sometimes attempts to evaluate in terms of money when one is deprived of them by the negligence or design of a third party. It does not seem consistent with our legal system that one who has these continuing rights should be deprived of them without a hearing. Neither does it seem that he or she should be summoned by mail, publication, or otherwise to a remote jurisdiction chosen by the other party and there be obliged to submit marital rights to adjudication under a state policy at odds with that of the state under which the marriage was contracted and the matrimonial domicile was established. Marriage is often dealt with as a contract. Of course a personal judgment could not be rendered against an absent party on a cause of action arising out of an ordinary commercial contract, without personal service of process. I see no reason why the marriage contract, if such it be considered, should be discriminated against, nor why a party to a marriage contract should be more vulnerable to a foreign judgment without process than a party to any other contract. I agree that the marriage contract is different, but I should think the difference would be in its favor. The Court thinks the difference is the other way: we are told that divorce is not a mere in personam action since Haddock v. Haddock, supra , held that domicile is necessary to jurisdiction for divorce. But to hold that a state cannot have divorce jurisdiction unless it is the domicile is not to hold that it must have such jurisdiction if it is the domicile, as Haddock v. Haddock itself demonstrates. Further support for this view seems to be seen in Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190, and in the Court's subsequent approval of that case in Haddock v. Haddock, supra, at 569, 572, 574, 575, 579. All that Maynard v. Hill decided was that the Territory of Washington had jurisdiction to cut off any interest of an absent spouse in land within its borders. But protection of land in the jurisdiction and protection against bigamy prosecutions out of the jurisdiction are plainly different matters. [3] Although the Court concedes that its present decision would be insupportable if divorce were a mere in personam action, it relies for support on opinions that the state where one is domiciled has the power to enter valid criminal, tax, and simple money judgments against  not for  him. [4] Those opinions are wholly inapposite unless they mean that Nevada has jurisdiction to nullify contract rights of a person never in the state or to declare that he is not liable for the commission of crime, payment of taxes, or the breach of a contract, in another state; and I am sure that nobody has ever supposed they meant that. To hold that the Nevada judgments were not binding in North Carolina because they were rendered without jurisdiction over the North Carolina spouses, it is not necessary to hold that they were without any conceivable validity. It may be, and probably is, true that Nevada has sufficient interest in the lives of those who sojourn there to free them and their spouses to take new spouses without incurring criminal penalties under Nevada law. I know of nothing in our Constitution that requires Nevada to adhere to traditional concepts of bigamous unions or the legitimacy of the fruit thereof. And the control of a state over property within its borders is so complete that I suppose that Nevada could effectively deal with it in the name of divorce as completely as in any other. [5] But it is quite a different thing to say that Nevada can dissolve the marriages of North Carolinians and dictate the incidence of the bigamy statutes of North Carolina by which North Carolina has sought to protect her own interests as well as theirs. In this case there is no conceivable basis of jurisdiction in the Nevada court over the absent spouses, [6] and, a fortiori, over North Carolina herself. I cannot but think that in its preoccupation with the full faith and credit clause the Court has slighted the due process clause.