We have therefore a most interesting condi tion of concurrent jurisdictions applying to every inhabitant of the United States. The Fed eral courts are courts of limited jurisdiction— limited to authority expressly conferred by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but once jurisdiction is established, unlimited the scope of its exerdse. Congress has prescribed that the jurisdiction shall only exist when the matter in controversy has a pecuniary value exceeding $2,000, and that actions shall be brought only in the district within which the plaintiff or the defendant resides and has made provision for the removal from the State courts of causes which might originally have been brought in the Federal courts. Some of the States have attempted to prevent this increas ing jurisdiction of the Federal courts; for ex ample, by the passage of acts providing as a condition of a license to a foreign corporation to do business within the State, that such cor poration, if sued, would not remove the cause into the Federal court.
The field in which a State of the American Union may exercise its political or judicial au thority is circumscribed by its geographical boundaries. The process of its courts can reach only persons who reside in, or voluntarily come into, their jurisdictional limits, or property which is located in, or is brought into, the ter ritory of the State. An action for debt against a non-resident can be conducted only as a pro ceeding in rem against his property found in the State and held by writ of attachment ; a judgment in personam against a non-resident de fendant, who had not been served with initia tory process within the State or voluntarily en tered an appearance, would be a nullity. A suit for divorce is a proceeding in rem, the res being the status of the parties; and, when brought in the proper matrimonial domicile, substituted service of the summons and bill outside the State will give the court jurisdiction. Criminals, who have become fugitives from justice, are brought into the State from which they have fled on requisition to the governor of the State in which they have taken refuge.
National governments are similarly restricted, though their jurisdiction has wider limits. These may extend far beyond their national frontiers to lands and peoples over which the governments hold complete sovereignty or even a mere suzerainty or protectorate. Or the dominium of a government may extend to per sons of its own nationality living abroad, over whom, or in whose behalf, it claims extra-terri torial rights. The extra-territorial jurisdiction formerly exercised by the nations of European race in the non-Christian and imperfectly or ganized polities of the Orient and the Far East has been greatly narrowed. It was abolished in
Japan by treaties; it was declared no longer ex istent in Turkey by the law suppressing the capitularies and without regard for treaties. In Persia, China and a few other countries it is still the rule that nationals of European and American states can be tried for crime only in the consular courts of their own nationality; likewise these courts have exclusive jurisdic tion in civil actions in which their nationals are defendants, or which involve their civil status. Controversies between natives and extraterri torialized foreigners are sometimes triable in mixed courts. The most important of these was the one long maintained in Egypt, and to which the principal nations, including the United States, each appointed ajudge. There is a regularly organized United States District Court at Shanghai, forming part of the Federal judi ciary system.
Some national governments claim permanent dominium over their nationals wherever they go and contest the jurisdiction even of the countries to which their former subjects have emigrated, and in which they have become nat uralized. The Italian government, for instance, declined several years ago to surrender to the American authorities a former Italian subject, who had fled to Italy to escape trial in the Uni ted States for a crime alleged to have been committed by him in the latter country; the ground of refusal being that an Italian by birth or descent was answerable to courts of Italy alone for his delicts. His liability was not di minished by or altered by long absence from Italy, or by a voluntary change of civic status or allegiance, nor even by the accident of having been born in another country. The locus of the crime was considered quite immaterial. To prove its consistency the Italian government about the same time declined to accept jurisdic tion in a case involving a young American, the body of whose wife had been put into a trunk and thrown into Lake Como. The nativity of the offender, not the place of the offense, fixed the jurisdiction; let American courts try Americans and the Italian courts administer correction to Italians. This is the American and English rule of jurisdiction turned upside down and inside out. The Italian government receded some what from its position, but from considerations of comity, and without abandonment of its principles. The rule of dominium in personam also permits the French and other Continental European courts to take criminal jurisdiction over persons who are not, and never were, within the orbit of their territorial authority, and to try and convict such persons in their ab scence — which is the direct opposite of one of the fundamental principles of the common law.