Court Opinion

ID: 8148919
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-09-09 20:29:01.311614+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:39:31.559462
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stone,
concurring.
I agree that in the circumstances of the present case, the courts of New Hampshire, in giving effect to the public policy of that state, would be at liberty to apply the Vermont statute and thus, by comity, make it the applicable law of New Hampshire. In the absence of any controlling decision of the New Hampshire courts, I assume, as does the opinion of the Court, that they would do so and that what they would do we should do. Hence, it seems unnecessary to decide whether that result could be compelled, against the will of New Hampshire, by the superior force of the full faith and credit clause.
If decision of that question could not be avoided, I should hesitate to say that the Constitution projects the authority of the Vermont statute across state lines into New Hampshire, so that the New Hampshire courts, in fivirig the liability of the employer for a tortious act committed within the state, are compelled to apply Vermont law instead of their own. The full faith and credit clause *164has not hitherto been thought to do more than compel recognition, outside the state, of the operation and effect of its laws upon persons and events within it. Bonaparte v. Tax Court, 104 U. S. 592; Atchison, T. & S. F. Ry. Co. v. Sowers, 213 U. S. 55; Olmsted v. Olmsted, 216 U. S. 386; Tennessee Coal, Iron & R. Co. v. George, 233 U. S. 354; Hood v. McGehee, 237 U. S. 611; see Union Trust Co. v. Grosman, 245 U. S. 412, 415, 416; Western Union Telegraph Co. v. Brown, 234 U. S. 542, 547.
It is true that in this case the status of employer and employe, terminable at will, was created by Vermont laws operating upon them while they were within that state. I assume that the fact of its creation there must be recognized elsewhere, whenever material. But I am not prepared to say that that status, voluntarily continued by employer and employe and given a locus in New Hampshire by their presence within the state, may not be regulated there according to New Hampshire law, or that the legal consequences of acts of the employer or employe there, which grow out of or affect the status in New Hampshire, must, by mandate of the Constitution, be either defined or controlled, in the New Hampshire courts, by the laws of Vermont rather than of New Hampshire.
The interest, which New Hampshire has, in exercising that control, derived from the presence of employer and employe within its borders, and the commission of the tortious act there, is at least as valid as that of Vermont, derived from the fact that the status is that of its citizens, and originated when they were in Vermont, before going to New Hampshire. I can find nothing in the history of the full faith and credit clause, or the decisions under it, which lends support to the view that it compels any state to subordinate its domestic policy, with respect to persons and their acts within its borders, to the laws of any other. On the contrary, I think it should be interpreted as leaving the courts of New Hampshire free, in *165the circumstances now presented, either to apply or refuse to apply the law of Vermont, in accordance with their own interpretation of New Hampshire policy and law.