By the constitution it is declared that 'full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other state; and the congress may, by general laws, prescribe the manner in which such acts, records and proceedings shall be proved and the effect thereof.'By the act of 26th May, 1790, ch. 11, congress provided for the mode of authenticating the records and judicial proceedings of the state Courts, and then further declared that 'the records and judicial proceedings, authenticated as aforesaid, shall have such faith and credit given to them in every Court within the United States as they have by law or usage in the Courts of the state from whence the said records are or shall be taken.'
It is argued that this act provides only for the admission of such records as evidence, but does not declare the effect of such evidence when admitted. This argument cannot be supported, The act declares that the record duly authenticated shall have such faith and credit as it has in the state Court from whence it is taken. If in such Court it has the faith and credit of evidence of the highest nature, viz. record evidence, it must have the same faith and credit in every other Court. Congress have therefore declared the effect of the record by declaring what faith and credit shall be given to it.
Justice Story, Mills v. Duryee, 11 Cranch 481, 483-484 (1813)
10 Wheat. 152 1825
Mr. Chief Justice Marshall
* * *
This court has uniformly professed its disposition, in cases depending on the laws of a particular state, to adopt the construction which the courts of the state have given to those laws. This course is founded on the principle, supposed to be universally recognised, that the judicial department of every government, where such department exists, is the appropriate organ for construing the legislative acts of that government. Thus, no court in the universe, which professed to be governed by principle, would, we presume, undertake to say, that the courts of Great Britain, or of France, or of any other nation, had misunderstood their own statutes, and therefore erect itself into a tribunal which should correct such misunderstanding. We receive the construction given by the courts of the nation, as the true sense of the law, and feel ourselves no more at liberty to depart from that construction, than to depart from the words of the statute. On this principle, the construction given by this court to the constitution and laws of the United States is received by all as the true construction; and on the same principle, the construction given by the courts of the several states to the legislative acts of those states, is received as true, unless they come in conflict with the constitution, laws or treaties of the United States. If, then, this question has been settled in Kentucky, we must suppose it to be rightly settled.