o jurisdiction in cases involving judgments
_in personam_, the Court was in the main making only a somewhat more
extended application of recognized principles. In order to sustain the
same kind of challenge in cases involving judgments _in rem_ it has had
to make law outright. The leading case is Thompson _v._ Whitman,[47]
decided in 1874. Thompson, sheriff of Monmouth County, New Jersey,
acting under a New Jersey statute, had seized a sloop belonging to
Whitman, and by a proceeding _in rem_ had obtained its condemnation and
forfeiture in a local court. Later, Whitman, a citizen of New York,
brought an action for trespass against Thompson in the United States
Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, and Thompson
answered by producing a record of the proceedings before the New Jersey
tribunal. Whitman thereupon set up the contention that the New Jersey
court had acted without jurisdiction inasmuch as the sloop which was the
subject matter of the proceedings had been seized outside the county to
which, by the statute under which it had acted, its jurisdiction was
confined.

Thompson _v._ Whitman

As previously explained, the plea of lack of privity cannot be set up in
defense in a sister State against a judgment _in rem_. It is, on the
other hand, required of a proceeding _in rem_ that the _res_ be within
the court's jurisdiction, and this, it was urged, had not been the case
in Thompson _v._ Whitman. Could, then, the Court consider this challenge
with respect to a judgment which was offered not as the basis for an
action for enforcement through the courts of a sister State, but merely
as a defense in a collateral action? As the law stood in 1873, it
apparently could not.[48] All difficulties, nevertheless, to its
consideration of the challenge to jurisdiction in the case were brushed
aside by the Court. Whenever, it said, the record of a judgment rendered
in a State court is offered "in evidence" by either of the parties to an
action in another State, it may be contradicted as to the facts
necessary to sustain the former court's jurisdiction; "and if it be
shown that such facts did not exist, the record will be a nullity,
notwithstanding the claim that they did exist."[49]

Divorce Decrees

THE JURISDICTIONAL PREREQUISITE: DOMICILE

This however, was only the beginning of the court's lawmaking in cases
_in rem_. The most important class of such cases is that in which the
respondent to a suit for d