[68] 334 U.S. 378 (1948).—In a dissenting opinion filed in the case of Sherrer v. Sherrer, but applicable also to the case of Coe v. Coe, Justice Frankfurter, with Justice Murphy concurring, asserted his inability to accept the proposition advanced by the majority that "regardless of how overwhelming the evidence may have been that the asserted domicile in the State offering bargain-counter divorces was a sham, the home State of the parties is not permitted to question the matter if the form of a controversy had been gone through."—334 U.S. 343, 377 (1948).
[69] 336 U.S. 674 (1949).—Of four Justices dissenting (Black, Douglas, Rutledge, Jackson), Justice Jackson alone filed a written opinion. To him the decision is "an example of the manner in which, in the law of domestic relations, 'confusion now hath made his masterpiece,'" but for the first Williams case and its progeny, the judgment of the Connecticut court might properly have held that the Rice divorce decree was void for every purpose because it was rendered by a State court which never obtained jurisdiction of the nonresident defendant. "But if we adhere to the holdings that the Nevada court had power over her for the purpose of blasting her marriage and opening the way to a successor, I do not see the justice of inventing a compensating confusion in the device of divisible divorce by which the parties are half-bound and half-free and which permits Rice to have a wife who cannot become his widow and to leave a widow who was no longer his wife." Ibid. 676, 679, 680.
[70] Vermont violated the clause in sustaining a collateral attack on a Florida divorce decree, the presumption of Florida's jurisdiction over the cause and the parties not having been overcome by extrinsic evidence or the record of the case. Cook v. Cook, 342 U.S. 126 (1951). The Sherrer and Coe cases were relied upon. There seems, therefore, to be no doubt of their continued vitality.
[71] Barber v. Barber, 323 U.S. 77, 84 (1944).
[72] Sistare v. Sistare, 218 U.S. 1, 11 (1910). See also Barber v. Barber, 21 How. 582 (1859); Lynde v. Lynde, 181 U.S. 183, 186-187 (1901); Bates v. Bodie, 245 U.S. 520 (1918); Audubon v. Shufeldt, 181 U.S. 575, 577 (1901); Yarbrough v. Yarbrough, 290 U.S. 202 (1933); Loughran v. Loughran, 292 U.S. 216 (1934).
[73] Griffin v. Griffin, 327 U.S. 220 (1946).
[74] Ibid. 228. An alimony case of a quite extraordinary pattern was that of Sutton v. Leib. On account of the diverse citizenship of the parties, who had once been husband and wife, the case was brought by the latter in a federal court in Illinois. Her suit was to recover unpaid alimony which was to continue until her remarriage. To be sure, she had, as she confessed, remarried in Nevada, but the marriage had been annulled in New York on the ground that the man was already married, inasmuch as his divorce from his previous wife was null and void, she having neither entered a personal appearance nor been personally served. The Court, speaking by Justice Reed, held that the New York annulment of the Nevada marriage must be given full faith and credit in Illinois, but left Illinois to decide for itself the effect of the annulment upon the obligations of petitioner's first husband. Sutton v. Leib, 342 U.S. 402 (1952).
[75] Halvey v. Halvey, 330 U.S. 610, 615 (1947).
[76] Johnson v. Muelberger, 341 U.S. 581 (1951).
[77] Tilt v. Kelsey, 207 U.S. 43 (1907); Burbank v. Ernst, 232 U.S. 162 (1914).