Cross-Border Judgments and the Public Policy Exception: Solving the Foreign Judgment Quandary by Way of Tribal Courts

Abstract

In their 1968 seminal survey on the “recognition of foreign adjudications,” Professors Arthur von Mehren and Donald Trautman set out five reasons attesting to the vital importance of recognizing judgments rendered in foreign nations. The policies they highlighted focused on efficiency, protection of the successful party, forum shopping, grant of authority to the more appropriate jurisdiction, and “an interest in fostering stability and unity in an international order in which many aspects of life are not confined to any single jurisdiction.” Today, more than thirty-five years later, their reasoning rings true, as the issues surrounding both the recognition and the enforcement of foreign judgments have never been more salient. Breakthroughs in real-time communication in the last twenty-five years are only one reason for ever-blurring borders between nations. As human action and the need for efficiency increasingly demand that the judgments of one country’s courts are recognized and enforced by other nations, there