The Duchess of Kingston's Case

It supplies the formula that makes the fraud defence workable. Without it, every losing party could dress up a complaint about the foreign court's reasoning as an allegation of fraud, and conclusiveness would mean nothing.

This course cites the case for the distinction the Supreme Court drew from it in Satya v. Teja Singh, and does not set out its facts.

The distinction drawn is between saying that the foreign court was mistaken, which is impermissible, and saying that it was misled, which is not. The essential distinction is thus between mistake and trickery.

Step one — separate the two complaints. A court that gets the law or the facts wrong has made a mistake. A court that has been deceived by a party has been misled. The first is an error of the tribunal; the second is a wrong by the litigant.

Step two — see why only one is admissible. Conclusiveness exists so that the same dispute is not tried twice; it protects the foreign court's decision. It was never intended to protect a party's deceit, because the obligation the forum enforces is one the deceiving party obtained and does not deserve.

Step three — apply it to jurisdiction. The distinction does its sharpest work where the deceit concerns the facts that gave the foreign court jurisdiction. Fraud in any case bearing on jurisdictional facts vitiates all judicial acts, whether in rem or in personam.

It opens: How is the fraud defence reconciled with the conclusiveness of a foreign judgment?

Anchor it in Satya v. Teja Singh, where the Nevada decree was refused recognition because the husband had never been bona fide domiciled in Nevada and had invoked that court's jurisdiction by misrepresenting the jurisdictional fact. Add the further proposition from the same case, that it is wrong to think that judgments in rem are inviolable: s. 41 of the Evidence Act makes such a judgment conclusive proof only if the court was competent, and competence means competence in the international sense.

Use the formula to test a problem. Ask what the defendant is really complaining of. If the answer is that the foreign court reached the wrong result, cite Godard v. Gray and refuse the plea. If the answer is that a party procured that result by deceit, the plea is open — subject, in India, to the requirement of new evidence in Sankaran Govindan.

Name the current Indian provision. The Indian Evidence Act, 1872 has been replaced by the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023; s. 41 of the old Act corresponds to s. 35 of the new one, and the right of a party to show that the judgment was delivered by an incompetent court or obtained by fraud or collusion, formerly s. 44, is carried forward by s. 36.

It does not decide any question of private international law itself; it supplies a distinction that this course borrows.