## Facts

- Bertha Weidman and Abraham Weidman married abroad and later lived apart.
- Abraham moved to New York and brought matrimonial proceedings there.
- A New York court ordered Abraham to pay Bertha alimony pendente lite and counsel fees and later entered a final judgment for a sum certain in her favor.
- New York law provided enforcement mechanisms for the money judgment (including execution and certain matrimonial enforcement procedures).
- Bertha alleged Abraham did not pay and filed a bill in equity in Massachusetts seeking to compel payment of the New York judgment.
- At the time of the Massachusetts suit, the parties remained legally married (no divorce or annulment had terminated the marriage).

## Issues

1. Whether, under Massachusetts law, a wife may maintain a suit in equity against her husband to compel payment of a sister-state money judgment for pendente lite alimony and counsel fees while the marriage still subsists.
2. Whether the Full Faith and Credit Clause requires Massachusetts to provide an equitable remedy to enforce such a judgment when Massachusetts law affords no comparable remedy.

## Decision

- The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the decree dismissing the wife’s bill in equity.
- The court held that a wife could not maintain an equity suit against her husband in Massachusetts to compel payment of a New York judgment for alimony pendente lite and counsel fees while the marriage continued.
- The court held that full faith and credit did not require Massachusetts to create or expand remedial machinery to provide the requested equitable action.
- The court noted it could affirm a correct decree even if the trial judge’s stated reasoning was unsound.

## Legal Principles

- The fact that spouses are married, and thus the wife cannot sue the husband at law on the obligation, does not itself confer equity jurisdiction in Massachusetts.
- Full faith and credit requires recognition of sister-state judgments’ validity and effect, but does not compel a state to establish a court or remedy that its own system of jurisprudence does not provide to anyone.
- Massachusetts courts are not required, under full faith and credit, to enforce in equity at a wife’s suit a sister-state judgment against her husband while the marital relation subsists when no similar obligation is enforceable by a wife against her husband in equity under Massachusetts law.

## Conclusion

Massachusetts refused to entertain an equity action by a wife against her still-married husband to collect a New York pendente lite alimony and counsel-fee judgment, and it held that the Full Faith and Credit Clause did not obligate Massachusetts to supply an otherwise unavailable equitable remedy to enforce the foreign judgment.


Weidman v. Weidman, 174 N.E. 206 (Mass. 1931)