HOOD
v.
MCGEHEE

U.S. | 1915-06-01
No. 281
237 U.S. 611 Supreme Court of the United States (1915) Positive Treatment
Also reported at: 59 L. Ed. 1144 · 35 S. Ct. 718 · SCDB 1914-124 · 1915 U.S. LEXIS 1374
Cited by 28 cases

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Synopsis

General Hood's adopted children sought to inherit Alabama land owned by their adoptive father George McGehee, relying on a Louisiana adoption decree that they claimed entitled them to inherit his estate under the Full Faith and Credit Clause. The Supreme Court affirmed dismissal of their claim, holding that Alabama's statute of descent lawfully excluded children adopted through proceedings in other states, and that states have exclusive sovereignty over the descent of their own land regardless of full faith and credit obligations to recognize adoptions from other jurisdictions.

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Opinion of the Court
Mr. Justice Holmes

Mr. Justice Holmes delivered the opinion of the court.

This is a bill to.quiet title to land in Alabama. It was dismissed by the Circuit. Court, on demurrer and the decree was affirmed without further discussion by the Circuit Court of Appeals. 189 Fed. Rep. 205. 199 Fed. Rep.

989. The plaintiffs and appellants-are children of the late General Hood and were adopted in Louisiana in 1880 by George T. McGehee, who bought the property in question in 1886. The defendants’ are McGehee’s heirs if the Louisiana adoption does not entitle the plaintiffs to the'Alabama land. The bill sets up that the adoption did entitle them to it by virtue of Article IV, § 1, of the Constitution and the Act of Congress in pursuance of the .same, entitling the Louisiana record to full faith and credit; By the instrument of adoption the McGehee’s 'bind and obligate themselves to support, maintain and educate them [the plaintiffs] as if they were their own children; and hereby invest them with all the rights and benefits of legitimate children in their éstate ’; and the bill further sets up that the latter clause-constituted a contract with the plaintiffs so to invest them. It alleges services as children to McGehee and also in advance to him of $8,600, being the plaintiffs’ share of the Hood Relief Fund collected in the Southern States.

Finally a familiar letter of McGehee to the plaintiffs, which has been probated as a will in Mississippi where McGehee lived, but is not alleged .to have been admitted to probate in Alabama, is set forth, valeat quantum. It states that, with immaterial exceptions, 'everything else of mine is to be yours equally divided’ and that the letter will be valid as a will.

The alleged -will is relied upon only as confirming the intent supposed to be expressed by the instrument of adoption and as showing that if the bill is dismissed it should be dismissed without prejudice. As there seems to be no ground for supposing that it could take effect on real estate in Alabama it may be laid on one side. The other contentions were correctly disposed of by Judge Grubb in an accurately reasoned opinion. The Alabama statute of' descents as construed by the Supreme Court of the State excludes children adopted by proceedings in other States. Brown v. Finley, 157 Alabama, 424. Lingen v. Lingen, 45 Alabama, 410. There is no ground upon which we can go behind these decisions, and the law; so construed is valid. The construction does not deny the effective operation of the Louisiana proceedings but simply reads the Alabama statute as saying that whatever may be the status of the plaintiffs, whatever their relation to the deceased by virtue of what has been done, the law does not devolve his estate upon them. There is no failure to give full credit to the adoption of the plaintiffs, in a provision denying them the right to inherit land in another State. Alábama is sole mistress of the devolution of Alabama land by descent. Olmsted v. Olmsted, 216 U. S. 386.

The language relied upon as a contract was simply the language of adoption used in the duly authorized notarial act. It had its full effect by constituting the plaintiffs adopted children under the Louisiana law. It gave them whatever rights the Louisiana law attempted and was competent to give them as such children, and it did not' purport to do more. As matter of supererogation we may repeat the remark of Judge Grubb that the proceeding gave the children nil that was expected at the time, as it was effective in Louisiana and recognized in Mississippi, and that it cannot acquire a greater scope on the strength of a subsequent purchase in Alabama, or from McGehee’s mistaken expectation that the land would descend to them.

Decree affirmed.

Cases With Similar Vibessemantic neighbors from the corpus

Citator

Cited By (11 total)

  • Williams v. North Carolina, 317 U.S. 287 (U.S. 1942)
    …d as clearly free her of the compulsions of the Full Faith and Credit Clause as did the interest of the state in the devolution of property within its boundaries in Fall v. Eastin, 215 U. S. 1; Olmsted v. Olmsted, 216 U. S. 386, and Hood v. McGehee, 237 U. S. 611, or the interests of a state in the application of its own workmen’s compensation statute in Alaska Packers Assn. v. Comm’n, supra, or its interest in declining to enforce the penal laws of another jurisdiction, cf. Huntington v. Attrill, 146 U. S.…
    1 / 3
  • Alaska Packers Ass'n v. Indus. Accident Comm'n of Cal., 294 U.S. 532 (U.S. 1935)
    …t of another state, in contravention of its own statutes or policy. See Wisconsin v. Pelican Insurance Co., 127 U. S. 265; Huntington v. Attrill, 146 U. S. 657; Finney v. Guy, 189 U. S. 335; see also Clarke v. Clarke, 178 U. S. 186; Hood v. McGehee, 237 U. S. 611; compare Gasquet v. Fenner, 247 U. S. 16. [*547] In the case of statutes, the extra-state effect of which Congress has not prescribed, where the policy of one state statute comes into conflict with that of another, the necessity of some accommodatio…
  • Magnolia Petroleum Co. v. Hunt, 320 U.S. 430 (U.S. 1943)
    …p. 108, 119 So. 88; Selser v. Bragmans Bluff Lumber Co., 146 So. 690 (La. App.). See, e. g., Huntington v. Attrill, 146 U. S. 657; Fall v. Eastin, 215 U. S. 1; Olmsted v. Olmsted, 216 U. S. 386; Converse v. Hamilton, 224 U. S. 243; Hood v. McGehee, 237 U. S. 611; Broderick v. Rosner, 294 U. S. 629, 642; cf. Wisconsin v. Pelican Ins. Co., 127 U. S. 265, 293 with Milwaukee County v. White Co., supra, 278. But cf. American Law Institute, Restatement of Conflict of Laws (1934) §403: “Award already had under t…

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