Introduction

Full Faith and Credit and Extradition

Introduction

Article IV of the Constitution asks the states for two kinds of mutual respect, and each answers a problem that a union of separate sovereigns would otherwise create. Section 1 provides that full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.¹ Its second sentence authorizes Congress to prescribe by general laws how those acts, records, and proceedings are proved and what effect they carry.² The second clause of Section 2 imposes a duty of a different kind: a person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime who flees and is found in another state must, on demand of the executive authority of the state from which the person fled, be delivered up to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime.³ Without the first command, a state's courts could treat every sister-state judgment as a foreign paper and make the winning party start over. Without the second, a state line would shelter anyone who crossed it ahead of a prosecutor. Together the clauses turn obligations that would otherwise rest on courtesy into constitutional duties.

The first analytical move on any problem in this area is therefore to identify what the second state is being asked to do. A request to honor a judgment invokes the Full Faith and Credit Clause, and the questions that follow concern how much weight the forum owes the judgment and whether any defense survives against it. A request to deliver a person charged with crime invokes the Extradition Clause, and the questions that follow concern whether a proper demand has passed from one state's executive to the other's. Sorting the request at the start keeps the two bodies of doctrine apart, since each has its own tests and the tests of one do not answer the questions of the other.

Section 2 also contains the Privileges and Immunities Clause and a clause covering persons held to service or labor.⁴ Neither is the subject of this chapter, and the service-or-labor clause no longer operates because the Thirteenth Amendment ended the institution it addressed. This chapter takes up judgments first: the command of the clause, the way a forum measures a sister-state judgment, and the limits on recognition that keep the clause from making every judgment untouchable. It then turns to extradition and the federal statute that supplies the procedure the constitutional text leaves out, and it closes by comparing the two clauses so a fact pattern can be sorted quickly. The first section begins with the text of Section 1 and the statute Congress enacted under its second sentence.