However, in an unacknowledged departure from this ruling the Court has subsequently held that the full faith and credit clause did not preclude California from disregarding a Massachusetts workmen's compensation statute and applying its own conflicting act in the case of an injury suffered by a Massachusetts employee of a Massachusetts employer while in California in the course of his employment.[121] The earlier case was distinguished as not having decided more than that a State statute, applicable to employer and employee within the State, which provides compensation if the employee is injured while temporarily in another State, will be given full faith and credit in the latter when not obnoxious to its policy. Inasmuch as the Court in the older decision is reputed to have observed that reliance on the Vermont statute, as a defense to the New Hampshire suit, was not obnoxious to the policy of New Hampshire, it may be possible to reconcile these two cases by stating that a foreign workmen's compensation statute will be recognized when it is invoked as a defense but need not be applied when the plaintiff endeavors to found his suit thereon.
Later decisions involving the recognition of a foreign workmen's compensation act include the following. In Magnolia Petroleum Co. v. Hunt[122] the Court ruled that a Louisiana employee of a Louisiana employer, who is injured on the job in Texas and who receives an award under the Texas Act, which does not grant further recovery to an employee who receives compensation under the laws of another State, cannot obtain additional compensation under the Louisiana Act. However, a compensation award by State A to a resident employee of a resident employer injured on the job in State B will not preclude State B from awarding added compensation under its own laws, when the compensation statute of State A does not expressly exclude recovery under a law of the State in which the injury occurred and when the State A award incorporated a private settlement contract wherein the employee reserved his rights in State B.[123] Also, the District of Columbia workmen's compensation act, which expressly covers an employee of the District employer, "irrespective of the place where the injury occurs," constitutionally may be applied, in the case of injury resulting in death, to a District resident, employed by a District employer, who was assigned to a job at Quantico, Virginia, and who, for three years prior to his death in Virginia, has commuted to the job site from his house in the District.[124]
Development of Section to Date and Possibilities
EVALUATION OF RESULTS
Thus the Court, from according an extrastate operation to statutes and judicial decisions in favor of defendants in transitory actions, proceeded next to confer the same protection upon certain classes of defendants in local actions in which the plaintiff's claim was the outgrowth of a relationship formed extraterritorially. But can the Court stop at this point? If it is true, as Chief Justice Marshall once remarked, that "the Constitution was not made for the benefit of plaintiffs alone," so also it is true that it was not made for the benefit of defendants alone. The day may come when the Court will approach the question of the relation of the full faith and credit clause to the extrastate operation of laws from the same angle as it today views the broader question of the scope of State legislative power. When and if this day arrives, State statutes and judicial decisions will be given such extraterritorial operation as seems reasonable to the Court to give them. In short, the rule of the dominance of local policy of the forum State will be superseded by that of judicial review.[125]
The question arises whether the application to date, not by the Court alone but by Congress and the Court, of article IV, section 1, can be said to have met the expectations of its framers. In the light of some things said at the time of the framing of the clause this may be doubted. The protest was raised against the clause that in vesting Congress with power to declare the effect State laws should have outside the enacting State, it enabled the new government to usurp the powers of the States; but the objection went unheeded. The main concern of the Convention, undoubtedly, was to render the judgments of the State courts in civil cases effective throughout the Union. Yet even this object has been by no means completely realized, owing to the doctrine of the Court that before a judgment of a State court can be enforced in a sister State, a new suit must be brought on it in the courts of the latter; and the further doctrine that with respect to such a suit, the judgment sued on is only evidence; the logical deduction from which proposition is that the sister State is under no constitutional compulsion to give it a forum. These doctrines were first clearly stated in the McElmoyle Case and flowed directly from the new States' rights premises of the Court; but they are no longer in harmony with the prevailing spirit of constitutional construction nor with the needs of the times. Also, the clause seems always to have been interpreted on the basis of the assumption that the term "judicial proceedings" refers only to final judgments and does not include intermediate processes and writs; but the assumption would seem to be groundless, and if it is, then Congress has the power under the clause to provide for the service and execution throughout the United States of the judicial processes of the several States.
SCOPE OF POWERS OF CONGRESS UNDER SECTION
Under the present system, suit has ordinarily to be brought where the defendant, the alleged wrongdoer, resides, which means generally where no part of the transaction giving rise to the action took place. What could be more irrational? "Granted that no state can of its own volition make its process run beyond its borders * * * is it unreasonable that the United States should by federal action be made a unit in the manner suggested?"[126]
Indeed, there are few clauses of the Constitution, the merely literal possibilities of which have been so little developed as the full faith and credit clause. Congress has the power under the clause to decree the effect that the statutes of one State shall have in other States. This being so, it does not seem extravagant to argue that Congress may under the clause describe a certain type of divorce and say that it shall be granted recognition throughout the Union, and that no other kind shall. Or to speak in more general terms, Congress has under the clause power to enact standards whereby uniformity of State legislation may be secured as to almost any matter in connection with which interstate recognition of private rights would be useful and valuable.
FULL FAITH AND CREDIT IN THE FEDERAL COURTS