Court Opinion

ID: 9419277
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:48:21.79842+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:17.061189
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring:
I join in the opinion of the Court but think it appropriate to add a few words.
Article 91 of the British North America Act (1867) gives the Parliament of Canada exclusive legislative authority to deal with marriage and divorce. Similarly, Article 51 of the Australia Constitution Act (1900) empowers the Commonwealth Parliament to make laws with respect to marriage and divorce. The Constitution of the United States, however, reserves authority over marriage and divorce to each of the forty-eight states. That is our starting-point. In a country like ours where each state has the constitutional power to translate into law its own notions of policy concerning the family institution, and where citizens pass freely from one state to another, tangled marital situations, like the one immediately before us, inevitably arise. They arose before and after the decision in the Haddock case, 201 U. S. 562, and will, I daresay, continue to arise no matter what we do today. For these complications cannot be removed by any decisions this Court can make — neither the crudest nor the subtlest juggling of legal concepts could enable us to bring forth a uniform national law of marriage and divorce.'
We are not authorized nor are we qualified to formulate a national code of domestic relations. We cannot, by *305making “jurisdiction” depend upon a determination of who is the deserter and who the deserted, or upon the shifting notions of policy concealed by the cloudy abstraction of “matrimonial domicile,” turn this into a divorce and probate court for the United States. There may be some who think our modern social life is such that there is today a need, as there was not when the Constitution was framed, for vesting national authority over marriage and divorce in Congress, just as the national legislatures of Canada and Australia have been vested with such powers. Beginning in 1884,1 numerous proposals to amend the Constitution to confer such authority have been introduced in Congress. But those whose business it is to amend the Constitution have not seen fit to amend it in this way. The need for securing national uniformity in dealing with divorce, either through constitutional amendment or by some other means, has long been the concern of the Conference of Governors and of special bodies convened to consider this problem. See, e. g., Proceedings of Governors’ Conference (1910) 185-98; Proceedings of National Congress on Uniform Divorce Laws (1906). This Court should abstain from trying to reach the same end by indirection. We should not feel challenged by a task that is not ours, even though it is difficult. Judicial attempts to solve problems that are intrinsically legislative — because their elements do not lend themselves to judicial judgment or because the necessary remedies are of a sort which judges cannot prescribe — are apt to be as futile in their achievement as they are presumptuous in their undertaking.
*306There is but one respect in which this Court can, within its traditional authority and professional competence, contribute uniformity to the law of marriage and divorce, and that is to enforce respect for the judgment of a state by its sister states when the judgment was rendered in accordance with settled procedural standards. As the Court's opinion shows, it is clearly settled that if a judgment is binding in the state where it was rendered, it is equally binding in every other state. This rule of law was not created by the federal courts. It comes from the Constitution and the Act of May 26, 1790, c. 11, 1 Stat. 122. Congress has not exercised its power under the Full Faith and Credit Clause to meet the special problems raised by divorce decrees. There will be time enough to consider the scope of its power in this regard when Congress chooses to exercise it.
The duty of a state to respect the judgments of a sister state arises only where such judgments meet the tests of justice and fair dealing that are embodied in the historic phrase, “due process of law.” But in this case all talk about due process is beside the mark. If the actions of the Nevada court had been taken “without due process of law,” the divorces which it purported to decree would have been without legal sanction in every state, including Nevada. There would be no occasion to consider the applicability of the Full Faith and Credit Clause. It is precisely because the Nevada decrees do satisfy the requirements of the Due Process Clause and are binding in Nevada upon the absent spouses that we are called upon to decide whether these judgments, unassailable in the state which rendered them, are, despite the commands of the Full Faith and Credit Clause, null and void elsewhere.
North Carolina did not base its disregard of the Nevada decrees on the claim that they were a fraud and a sham, and no claim was made here on behalf of North Carolina *307that the decrees were not valid in Nevada. It is indisputable that the Nevada decrees here, like the Connecticut decree in the Haddock case, were valid and binding in the state where they were rendered. Haddock v. Haddock, 201 U. S. 562, 569-70; Maynard v. Hill, 125 U. S. 190; Atherton v. Atherton, 181 U. S. 155. In denying constitutional sanction to such a valid judgment outside the state which rendered it, the Haddock decision made an arbitrary break with the past and created distinctions incompatible with the role of this Court in enforcing the Full Faith and Credit Clause. Freed from the hopeless refinements introduced by that case, the question before us is simply whether the Nevada decrees were rendered under circumstances that would make them binding against the absent spouses in the state where they were rendered. North Carolina did not challenge the power of Nevada to declare the marital status of persons found to be Nevada residents. North Carolina chose instead to disrespect the consequences of Nevada’s exertion of such power. It is therefore no more rhetorical to say that Nevada is seeking to impose its policy upon North Carolina than it is to say that North Carolina is seeking to impose its policy upon Nevada.
For all but a very small fraction of the community the niceties of resolving such conflicts among the laws of the states are, in all likelihood, matters of complete indifference. Our occasional pronouncements upon the requirements of the Full Faith and Credit Clause doubtless have little effect upon divorces. Be this as it may, a court is likely to lose its way if it strays outside the modest bounds of its own special competence and turns the duty of adjudicating only the legal phases of a broad social problem into an opportunity for formulating judgments of social policy quite beyond its competence as well as its authority.

 See Ames, Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States during the First Century of its History, contained in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1896, vol. II, p. 190; Sen. Doc. No. 93, 69th Cong., 1st Sess., and the successive compilations prepared by the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress.