Foreign Country Judgment Research Paper

The recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in the United States can be a quite confusing and complex matter. To begin with, every judgment not from the state in which enforcement is sought, is considered a “foreign judgment” regardless of whether the judgment is from another state within the United States or a foreign country. Luckily for foreign judgments from sister states, the Full Faith and Credit Clause of Article IV, Section 1 of the United States Constitution applies. Judgment creditors for foreign country judgments, however, are not so lucky because they cannot benefit from the Full Faith and Credit Clause. Furthermore, the United States has not ratified any international treaty that governs the recognition and enforcement of foreign country judgments nor has the United States enacted a federal statute that applies. Thus, the recognition and enforcement of foreign country judgments is left entirely up to state law even in diversity jurisdiction. Because there are 50 states applying 50 individual sets of state law, the process to obtain recognition …show more content…
The paper will then discuss the changes to the UFMJRA in the 2005 revision (known as the “Uniform Foreign-Country Money Judgments Recognition Act”). The rest of the paper will focus on the public policy exception which can be found in both the UFMJRA and the 2005 revision. The subcategories of that portion will provide a background of the public policy exception, and then proceed to discuss the change in language of the public policy exception in the 2005 revision to include the word “judgment.” More specifically, in that portion, I will argue that the addition of the word “judgment” in the revision was a better approach than the original language in the 1962 UFMJRA which limited the public policy exception to the underlying “cause of action” or “claim for