THE JURISDICTIONAL QUESTION

In short, when the subject matter of a suit is merely the determination of the defendant's liability, it is necessary that it should appear from the record that the defendant had been brought within the jurisdiction of the court by personal service of process, or his voluntary appearance, or that he had in some manner authorized the proceeding.[32] The claim that a judgment was "not responsive to the pleadings" raises the jurisdictional question;[33] but the fact that a nonresident defendant was only temporarily in the State when he was served in the original action does not vitiate the judgment rendered as the basis of an action in his home State.[34] Also, a judgment rendered in the State of his domicile against a defendant who, pursuant to the statute thereof providing for the service of process on absent defendants, was personally served in another State is entitled to full faith and credit.[35] Also, when the matter of fact or law on which jurisdiction depends was not litigated in the original suit, it is a matter to be adjudicated in the suit founded upon the judgment.[36]

Inasmuch as the principle of res judicata applies only to proceedings between the same parties and privies, the plea by defendant in an action based on a judgment that he was no party or privy to the original action raises the question of jurisdiction; and while a judgment against a corporation in one State may validly bind a stockholder in another State to the extent of the par value of his holdings,[37] an administrator acting under a grant of administration in one State stands in no sort of relation of priority to an administrator of the same estate in another State.[38] But where a judgment of dismissal was entered in a federal court in an action against one of two joint tortfeasors, in a State in which such a judgment would constitute an estoppel in another action in the same State against the other tort-feasor, such judgment is not entitled to full faith and credit in an action brought against the other tortfeasor in another State.[39]

SERVICE ON FOREIGN CORPORATIONS

In 1856 the Court decided Lafayette Insurance Co. v. French et al.,[40] a pioneer case in its general class. Here it was held that "where a corporation chartered by the State of Indiana was allowed by a law of Ohio to transact business in the latter State upon the condition that service of process upon the agent of the corporation should be considered as service upon the corporation itself, a judgment obtained against the corporation by means of such process" ought to receive in Indiana the same faith and credit as it was entitled to in Ohio.[41] Later cases establish under both the Fourteenth Amendment and article IV, section 1, that the cause of action must have arisen within the State obtaining service in this way,[42] that service on an officer of a corporation, not its resident agent and not present in the State in an official capacity, will not confer jurisdiction over the corporation;[43] that the question whether the corporation was actually "doing business" in the State may be raised.[44] On the other hand, the fact that the business was interstate is no objection.[45]

SERVICE ON OUT-OF-STATE OWNERS OF MOTOR VEHICLES

By analogy to the above cases, it has been held that a State may require nonresident owners of motor vehicles to designate an official within the State as an agent upon whom process may be served in any legal proceedings growing out of their operation of a motor vehicle within the State;[46] and while these cases arose under the Fourteenth Amendment alone, unquestionably a judgment validly obtained upon this species of service could be enforced upon the owner of a car through the courts of his home State.

JUDGMENTS IN REM

In sustaining the challenge to jurisdiction in cases involving judgments in personam, the Court was in the main making only a somewhat more extended application of recognized principles. In order to sustain the same kind of challenge in cases involving judgments in rem it has had to make law outright. The leading case is Thompson v. Whitman,[47] decided in 1874. Thompson, sheriff of Monmouth County, New Jersey, acting under a New Jersey statute, had seized a sloop belonging to Whitman, and by a proceeding in rem had obtained its condemnation and forfeiture in a local court. Later, Whitman, a citizen of New York, brought an action for trespass against Thompson in the United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, and Thompson answered by producing a record of the proceedings before the New Jersey tribunal. Whitman thereupon set up the contention that the New Jersey court had acted without jurisdiction inasmuch as the sloop which was the subject matter of the proceedings had been seized outside the county to which, by the statute under which it had acted, its jurisdiction was confined.

Thompson v. Whitman