Court Opinion

ID: 9420946
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:56:25.2246+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:27.771194
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring.
The views expressed by my brother Jackson make it important that I state, in joining the Court’s opinion, what I understand the Court to be deciding and what it is not deciding in this case.
What is decided — the only thing the Court decides — is that the Full Faith and Credit Clause does not require Ohio, in disposing of the custody of children in Ohio, to accept, in the circumstances before us, the disposition made by Wisconsin. The Ohio Supreme Court felt itself so bound. This Court does not decide that Ohio would be precluded from recognizing, as a matter of local law, the disposition made by the Wisconsin court. For Ohio to give respect to the Wisconsin decree would not offend *536the Due Process Clause. Ohio is no more precluded from doing so than a court of Ontario or Manitoba would be, were the mother to bring the children into one of these provinces.
Property, personal claims, and even the marriage status (see, e. g., Sherrer v. Sherrer, 334 U. S. 343), generally give rise to interests different from those relevant to the discharge of a State’s continuing responsibility to children within her borders. Children have a very special place in life which law should reflect. Legal theories and their phrasing in other cases readily lead to fallacious reasoning if uncritically transferred to determination of a State’s duty towards children. There are, of course, adjudications other than those pertaining to children, as for instance decrees of alimony, which may not be definitive even in the decreeing State, let alone binding under the Full Faith and Credit Clause. Interests of a State other than its duty towards children may also prevail over the interest of national unity that underlies the Full Faith and Credit Clause. But the child’s welfare in a custody case has such a claim upon the State that its responsibility is obviously not to be foreclosed by a prior adjudication reflecting another State’s discharge of its responsibility at another time. Reliance on opinions regarding out-of-State adjudications of property rights, personal claims or the marital status is bound to confuse analysis when a claim to the custody of children before the courts of one State is based on an award previously made by another State. Whatever light may be had from such opinions, they cannot give conclusive answers.