Opinion ID: 779012
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: issues

Text: 31 Perhaps the Jacksons' best argument is one that relates to the oddest aspect of this case: To prove that the judgment was void for lack of personal jurisdiction, Fratelli Tanfoglio raises an assertedly meritorious defense (identity of the pistol's manufacturer) that the district court's default judgment on the merits had flatly rejected. Because the identity of the pistol's manufacturer has ramifications for both jurisdiction and the merits, the foundational principle embodied in Rule 60(b)(4) collides head-on with a well-established rule of claim preclusion. In general, 32 [a]ttempts by a defendant to escape the effects of his default should be strictly circumscribed: he should not be given the opportunity to litigate what has already been considered admitted in law. The defendant, by his default, admits the plaintiff's well-pleaded allegations of fact, is concluded on those facts by the judgment, and is barred from contesting on appeal the facts thus established. A default judgment is unassailable on the merits.... 28 33 The Jacksons urge that their default judgment conclusively establishes well-pleaded facts, including the identity of the pistol's manufacturer, and that those facts cannot be re-examined under Rule 60(b)(4). The district court accepted this reasoning. 34 As support for this proposition, both the Jacksons and the district court looked to general language in a treatise, 29 without pointing to other passages of the same work that shed a different light on the proposition. 30 They also relied on broad language in two of our opinions without acknowledging that each opinion recites a more generalized version of this preclusion rule, and that in neither case did we apply that rule in the context of Rule 60(b)(4). 35 One of these cases, United States v. Shipco General, Inc., 31 dealt with preclusion at an earlier stage of the default-judgment process, and did not turn on jurisdiction at all. We did observe there that [a]fter a default judgment, the plaintiff's well-pleaded factual allegations are taken as true, except regarding damages, 32 and we neglected to mention personal jurisdiction as another exception. But as jurisdiction was not at issue in Shipco, the quoted passage is dictum with respect to the instant case. 36 The other case, Nishimatsu Construction Co., Ltd., v. Houston Nat'l Bank, 33 is of limited relevance here, for two reasons. First, in that case, the default-judgment debtor, after sitting out the trial, appealed the default judgment directly and therefore did not need to file a Rule 60(b) motion. Second, and more importantly, we did recite the rule that the defendant, by his default, admits the plaintiff's well-pleaded allegations of fact, is precluded from challenging those facts by the judgment, and is barred from contesting on appeal the facts thus established. 34 But this was written in the merits section of the opinion and was not meant to preclude the defendants' arguing that the district court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction. In fact, we agreed in part with one defendant's contention on that point and determined that the judgment against him was in part void for want of subject matter jurisdiction. 35 Thus, rather than supporting the Jacksons and the district court here, Nishimatsu merely stands for the universal rule that objections to subject-matter jurisdiction cannot be waived; it does not stand for the principle that objections to personal jurisdiction can be lost in a Rule 60(b)(4) context. 37 In like manner, Fratelli Tanfoglio proffers dicta from several of our cases which do suggest, as another court has put it, that a defendant's ability to contest personal jurisdiction should not be lost merely because some of the facts relevant to personal jurisdiction are also relevant to the merits. 36 The two Fifth Circuit cases relied on by Fratelli Tanfoglio have nothing to do, however, with Rule 60(b)(4); rather, they are concerned with subject-matter jurisdiction, a question that a registering court (and an appellate court, for that matter) has an obligation to answer, on its own motion if necessary. Furthermore, because these two cases hold that when jurisdictional and merits issues are factually intermeshed, questions about jurisdiction should be referred to the merits, they conceivably could be read against Fratelli Tanfoglio rather in its favor. 37 38 Being unable to resolve the instant conflict between these well-established rules of preclusion and personal jurisdiction on our own jurisprudence, we naturally look further afield for guidance. When we do, however, we encounter a paucity of cases in which a Rule 60(b)(4) movant has attacked a merits fact purporting to support due-process amenability to personal jurisdiction. To find such (or similar) cases, we must hark back all the way to the nineteenth century, prior to the adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the institution of the current personal-jurisdiction regime. In that era, we find one hoary Supreme Court case that comes close to resolving the tension that we address today. 39 In Thompson v. Whitman, 38 a citizen of New York, Whitman, sued Thompson, the sheriff of Monmouth County, New Jersey, in the Southern District of New York. 39 Whitman, the forum resident, alleged that Thompson, the non-resident, had seized and taken his (Whitman's) sloop from its situs in the forum state. 40 Thompson defended by relying on a prior New Jersey judgment in rem against the sloop itself, which vessel justices of the peace of Monmouth County had condemned and ordered sold on the ground that the sloop had been clamming within that county in violation of New Jersey law. 41 The question before the Supreme Court was whether the record [of the New Jersey case] produced by the defendant was conclusive of the jurisdictional facts therein contained. 42 The Court determined that the principal jurisdictional fact — whether the sloop had been seized in Monmouth County — could be attacked collaterally in the New York court: 40 [I]f it is once conceded that the validity of a judgment may be attacked collaterally by evidence showing that the court had no jurisdiction, it is not perceived how any allegation contained in the record itself, however strongly made, can affect the right so to question it. The very object of the evidence is to invalidate the paper as a record. If that can be successfully done no statements contained therein have any force. 43 41 Because the New York jury had found that the seizure was not made within the limits of the county of Monmouth, and that no clams were raked within the county on that day, 44 the Supreme Court ruled that the justices [of Monmouth County] had no jurisdiction, and the record had no validity. 45 Having held the New Jersey judgment to be invalid for want of jurisdiction, the Court did not remark on this result's tension with principles of preclusion, or on whether the New York court permissibly re-examined the merits of the New Jersey judgment. 42 Thompson is distinguishable from the instant case on several grounds, however. First, the New Jersey judgment was in rem, rather than in personam, albeit this distinction evidently did not strike the Thompson Court as particularly meaningful. 46 Second, Thompson had a full-faith-and-credit posture, unlike the instant case, in which Fratelli Tanfoglio has brought a jurisdictional challenge not collaterally, but directly in the rendering court. Under our Rule 60(b)(4) jurisprudence, this distinction actually militates in favor of entertaining the jurisdictional argument. 47 43 In a number of other cases, the Supreme Court has applied the principle that the personal jurisdiction of the default-judgment rendering court may always be attacked by the default-judgment debtor in the registering court. Nevertheless, of the cases we have found, none features a dually significant fact, such as the location of the sloop in Thompson or the identity of the pistol maker here. 44 Yet many Supreme Court opinions — going back at least as far as Harris v. Hardeman, 48 in 1852 — have held that the registering court must inquire into notice and service of process. 49 To similar effect is a line of divorce cases holding that, as a corollary to the personal-jurisdiction exception of the Full Faith and Credit Act, the registering court may always inquire into the domicile of the parties to the divorce. 50 45 Our own cases are similar. We have frequently applied the foregoing principles to appeals of Rule 60(b)(4) motions that alleged improper service of process or a lack of notice. 51 In Recreational Properties, Inc. v. Southwest Mortgage Service Corp., 52 for example, we reversed the denial of a Rule 60(b)(4) motion because, when the defendant received the mail containing service of process, he reasonably believed that the envelopes lacked sufficient postage and that postage was due. 53 Consequently, the defendant was free to refuse delivery, which he did. 54 We concluded that [s]ervice of process ... was not perfected and the default judgment is void and must be vacated. 55 One of our later cases relied on Recreational Properties for the principle that when service of process is improper, the default judgment is void, and the district court must grant a Rule 60(b)(4) motion for relief from it. 56 Other courts have done the same. 57 46 Service of process and notice of proceedings, however, are not merits issues; neither is domicile of parties. No matter how strongly cases on these issues may state the rule that a registering court may inquire into the personal jurisdiction of a rendering court, they do not necessarily control the instant situation, in which the district court found, on the merits, a fact that Fratelli Tanfoglio now seeks to undermine, so as to defeat jurisdiction. 47 We conclude, nevertheless, that the logic of the service and notice cases, of the domicile cases, and of Thompson should apply equally here. We do so not so much because the precedents compel this result, but because we judge that — at least given the conflict here between the federal rules governing jurisdiction on the one hand and res judicata on the other 58 — in this case, the protections of personal jurisdiction must trump the doctrine of claim preclusion. This result rests on at least two justifications. 48 First, [r]es judicata is very much a common law subject. 59 A judicially-derived principle of preclusion generally must perforce yield to the contrary command of a formal rule such as Rule 60(b)(4). 60 49 Second, the res judicata doctrine protects private and public values — such as repose, finality, and efficiency — that are important, but have not yet found much expression as constitutional principles, at least in the civil context. 61 It appears that the Supreme Court has only once adverted, and then obliquely, to the possibility that due process might prevent the relitigation of matters already decided. 62 We ourselves do not appear ever to have contemplated this possibility. Whatever due-process theory might require, current due-process doctrine concerns itself only minimally, if at all, with preserving any property right that the Jacksons may have acquired through their default judgment. Due-process doctrine is far more concerned with protecting the ability of a party like Fratelli Tanfoglio to contest a rendering court's power to bind it to a judgment in the first place. 50 The fact that one of the principles in tension here is a development of the jurisprudence, and the other is a constitutional value, may partly be a matter of historical contingency rather than logic or principled theory. But that is nonetheless the state of the law, and we must apply it as we find it. 51