Authored By: Muskan Pandey
University of Allahabad
The Hook
Late October 2025, a Friday, and a state trial judge sitting in Kingston, New York, quietly ended one of the stranger lawsuits to come out of the post-Roe years. Barely anyone outside reproductive-rights circles noticed. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had gone to court trying to force a New York county clerk to file — and by filing, help enforce — a Texas civil judgment against Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter, an Ulster County physician who had prescribed abortion medication by telehealth to a patient in Texas. The clerk, Taylor Bruck, had already turned Paxton down twice, pointing to New York’s shield law. Justice David Gandin sided with him and threw the case out.1
Stop and consider how odd that is, judged against ordinary legal expectations. New York’s shield statute lets a government official simply decline to help enforce a valid judgment handed down by another state’s courts — because the underlying conduct happened to be legal at home.2 And this wasn’t some symbolic paper judgment either: a Collin County court had entered a $113,000 default award against Dr. Carpenter after she chose not to show up and defend herself.3 In New York, none of that mattered. The judgment was worth nothing.
Paxton didn’t treat the loss as the end of the road. Within months he’d filed an almost identical case against a Delaware nurse practitioner, then a completely new suit in Texas courts targeting an out-of-state physician along with a European telehealth organisation — this time asking for an injunction outright instead of trying to chase a judgment across state lines.4 Three lawsuits. Three different legal theories. One question sitting underneath all of them: what does a state actually do when a neighboring state’s courts simply refuse to play along?
That question isn’t really about abortion pills, not at the doctrinal level anyway. It’s about a piece of the Constitution most law students brush past in a first-year conflicts course and rarely think about again: the Full Faith and Credit Clause. The whole point of that clause is to prevent exactly this kind of standoff. Whether it can still do that job in 2026 is the question this piece tries to answer.
Background and Context
The Post-Dobbs Landscape
When the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, it billed the ruling as a return to ordinary democratic self-government: nothing in the Constitution speaks to a right to abortion, so states and their elected legislatures get to decide.5 Four years later, that hasn’t produced fifty tidy, self-contained policy experiments running in parallel. It’s produced something closer to open conflict — and increasingly, that conflict plays out across state lines rather than within them.
The raw numbers tell part of it. Twelve states ban abortion from conception, four cap it at six weeks, and four more prohibit it before viability — a large chunk of the country where ordinary in-state access simply doesn’t exist anymore.6 States that kept or expanded access haven’t stopped at protecting care within their own borders, either. They’ve gone further, actively shielding providers who treat patients living elsewhere, because telehealth has made state lines nearly irrelevant to where care can be obtained, even though those same lines remain very relevant to where it’s nominally lawful.
None of this happened without provocation. Restrictive states gave shield-law advocates plenty of reason to think a purely defensive, stay-in-your-own-lane approach wouldn’t hold up. Idaho and Tennessee both passed laws criminalizing the act of helping a minor cross state lines for an abortion without parental involvement — legislation the press quickly labeled “abortion trafficking,” though the Idaho version is narrower than that name suggests. It turns on intent to conceal the abortion from a parent, and parental consent is a full defense. The statute got challenged on First Amendment and vagueness grounds, and the Ninth Circuit partially upheld an injunction against it, finding that its “recruiting” provision swept up too much protected speech. 7 Separately, coalitions of state attorneys general floated reaching residents who simply travel out of state for care, even where the specific bills never got out of committee.8 Whatever their success rate, the message landed. Shield laws were the direct response.
What Shield Laws Actually Do
“Shield law” is a convenient shorthand, but it flattens what’s really a bundle of separate protections a legislature can adopt piece by piece. Some version now exists in eighteen states plus DC.9 Three features matter most for what follows.
First, plenty of shield statutes bar a state’s own courts and agencies from cooperating with an out-of-state investigation tied to abortion care that was lawful where it was given — refusing subpoenas, witness summonses, discovery orders, the works. Second, eighteen states won’t let medical boards discipline a provider’s license over care that was lawful where rendered, which protects the ability to practice at all rather than just liability in any single case. Third — and this is the one that matters most here — seventeen states tell their courts to refuse enforcement of a foreign civil judgment arising from legal abortion care, and some throw in “clawback” provisions letting a sued provider recover litigation costs once they’re back home.10
Until pretty recently that third protection was mostly theoretical. Cross-border suits against shield-state providers were, by most accounts, close to nonexistent for the first couple of years after Dobbs, so the enforcement-refusal provisions just sat there, untested.11 Telehealth medication abortion changed that. A physician licensed and physically located entirely within a shield state can now prescribe to a patient physically located in a restrictive one, and neither party ever crosses a border. That gives restrictive-state attorneys general both a target and, in their reading, a clean jurisdictional theory: whatever harm occurs happens where the patient lives and takes the medication, not wherever the prescription happened to get written.12 That theory is what produced the judgment against Dr. Carpenter. New York’s refusal to enforce it is what’s still, largely, unresolved — and it’s the center of this piece.
Worth adding: Louisiana has pushed this fight one step further, passing a 2025 law that lets private citizens sue shield-state providers directly, labeling them, not subtly, “abortion drug dealers.”13 The interstate fight isn’t confined to Texas, in other words, and it isn’t slowing down.
Thesis and Roadmap
This article argues that the Carpenter, Lynch, and Aid Access litigation exposes a real fork in Full Faith and Credit doctrine, one the Supreme Court has never actually had to confront in this form, and one neither side of the underlying abortion debate can honestly claim existing precedent has already resolved for them.
Shield-law states are leaning — whether they say so out loud or not — on the old “penal judgment” exception to Full Faith and Credit: a state doesn’t have to enforce a sister state’s judgment if that judgment is essentially penal, meant to punish a public wrong rather than compensate a private one.14 Enforcing states are leaning on the equally old rule that mere disagreement with another state’s substantive law isn’t, by itself, grounds to refuse a facially valid judgment. Full Faith and Credit exists specifically so a forum state can’t just relitigate a result it doesn’t like.
Both rules are real. Both are well established. And applied to a case like Carpenter, they point in opposite directions. My argument is that the penal-judgment exception doesn’t resolve this as cleanly as shield-law advocates suggest — but the ordinary comity rule doesn’t resolve it as cleanly as enforcing states suggest either. What exists right now is a genuine doctrinal gap, not a settled answer dressed up as uncertainty, and it won’t stay open forever. As telehealth abortion care keeps expanding and restrictive states keep testing new enforcement theories, pressure on the Supreme Court to step in will only build.
Legal Framework and Case Law Analysis
The Full Faith and Credit Baseline
Article IV, Section 1 requires “Full Faith and Credit” for “the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.” The Supreme Court’s foundational reading of this clause for civil judgments came in Fauntleroy v Lum: a judgment valid where it was rendered generally has to be enforced elsewhere, even if the enforcing state’s own courts would have reached a different result on identical facts.15 Fauntleroy treats Full Faith and Credit as a constitutional command, not some favor extended out of politeness — a forum state can’t just refuse a judgment because it doesn’t like the law behind it.
If that were the whole story, shield laws’ refusal-to-enforce provisions would be in real trouble. But Fauntleroy has never been treated as absolute. The meaningful limitation is the penal-judgment exception, laid out most clearly in Huntington v Attrill: a state doesn’t have to enforce a sister state’s judgment if it’s “penal” in the international-law sense — vindicating a public wrong rather than compensating a private injury. Huntington tells courts to look past whatever label a rendering state slaps on a claim and ask what the judgment is actually doing: making an injured party whole, or punishing an offense against the public at large?16
Applying the Penal-Judgment Exception to Abortion Judgments
This is where the current litigation gets genuinely hard, and where commentators on both sides sound more confident than the doctrine actually supports. The Texas judgment against Dr. Carpenter arose under a private civil-enforcement statute modeled on the mechanism the Texas Heartbeat Act first used, which lets private plaintiffs sue anyone who performs or assists a prohibited abortion and recover statutory damages regardless of any personal injury to the plaintiff.17 Read one way, this is just an ordinary civil judgment: a private party sued, proved a statutory claim, won damages. Fauntleroy says New York has to enforce that whatever it thinks of Texas’s abortion law.
Read the other way, the mechanism is functionally penal even though it’s wearing a civil costume. It was built, as commentators pointed out when Texas first rolled this model out, to accomplish through private lawsuits what an ordinary criminal statute would accomplish directly — punishing conduct the state has substantively criminalized, using damages untethered to any real loss, deputizing private plaintiffs with no personal stake in the transaction as something close to private attorneys general. If that reading wins, Huntington applies with real force and New York owes Texas nothing.
The trouble is, no court has actually settled which reading controls. Justice Gandin’s decision in Paxton v Bruck is instructive mostly for what it didn’t do: he ruled the county clerk correctly followed New York’s shield statute in refusing to file the judgment, but pointedly declined to reach the constitutional Full Faith and Credit question, noting Paxton hadn’t squarely put the shield law’s constitutionality in front of him.18 That’s a real result, and shield-law advocates are entitled to call it a win. But it’s a procedural win, not a doctrinal one — one unappealed trial-court order that carefully sidestepped the exact question this article is about.19
Extraterritoriality and Due Process Limits
A second, related thread asks whether a state can even apply its own law to conduct happening entirely outside its borders in the first place. In BMW of North America Inc v Gore, the Supreme Court held that due process limits a state’s power to punish conduct that was lawful where it occurred, even where that conduct has downstream effects felt in-state.20 Shield-law advocates say this maps directly onto Carpenter: a physician licensed in New York, physically present in New York, fully compliant with New York law when she writes a prescription, hasn’t done anything Texas can legitimately punish — regardless of where the prescription later gets filled.
Enforcing states push back that BMW dealt with punitive damages for lawful conduct with only incidental in-state effects, and that this context is different in kind: the whole point of the telehealth transaction is to end a pregnancy occurring in Texas, to a Texas resident, and the prescriber sitting across a state line is, on this view, no more significant than any other mail-order setup built to route around local law. A related, older line of cases, Bigelow v Virginia, recognized a constitutional interest in receiving truthful information about lawful out-of-state services, including abortion — which cuts somewhat toward the shield-law side, though Bigelow concerned advertising restrictions rather than judgment enforcement, so it’s a loose analogy at best.21
The Current Litigation as a Testing Ground
Reading the three pending Texas matters together makes clear what’s actually at stake. Paxton v Bruck tested the pure enforcement route: win a default judgment at home, then ask a shield state’s officials to help collect. That route just hit a wall — though not a constitutional one. Texas v Lynch largely repeats the strategy against a different provider in a different state, which suggests Texas either expects a different outcome elsewhere or is fine building a pile of conflicting decisions that eventually becomes hard for the Supreme Court to ignore.22 Texas v Aid Access tries something else entirely: instead of chasing an out-of-state judgment, Texas sued directly in its own courts against an out-of-state, and in Aid Access’s case foreign, defendant, seeking an original injunction. That sidesteps the Full Faith and Credit fight in favor of a more conventional — if still genuinely contested — personal-jurisdiction dispute, and it’ll probably turn on whether Texas courts can assert jurisdiction over a defendant abroad based solely on effects felt by Texas residents.23
Critical Analysis and Conclusion
Two things follow from this survey. First, both sides are currently overselling the strength of their position. Shield-law advocates are right that the penal-judgment exception and extraterritoriality principles give them real doctrinal support, but wrong to treat that support as settled; Huntington’s formal-versus-functional line has never been definitively applied to a statutory civil-enforcement scheme quite like this one, and a single unappealed trial order that expressly ducked the constitutional question does not establish a rule, whatever the press releases say. Enforcing states are right that Fauntleroy’s general rule strongly favours enforcing facially valid judgments, but wrong to treat the penal-judgment exception as a narrow technicality that plainly does not apply; a mechanism built around private plaintiffs with no personal injury, damages untethered from actual loss, and an evident deterrent rather than compensatory purpose sits closer to what Huntington was written to address than either side’s public rhetoric tends to admit.
Second, and more importantly, this gap is not a stable resting place. It exists today mainly because litigation testing it is genuinely new — cross-border suits against shield-state providers were close to nonexistent until the last couple of years. That will not remain true. Telehealth medication abortion is now an established and expanding channel of care, restrictive-state attorneys general have shown they will keep filing new theories even after early setbacks, and shield-state legislatures have shown equal willingness to keep strengthening their own protections in response.24 Every new filing, whether it wins or loses, adds another data point to a growing pile of unresolved or conflicting lower-court outcomes — a pile that eventually becomes hard for the Supreme Court to leave alone, particularly given its evident interest in cases that test the outer edges of Dobbs. The First Amendment fight over Idaho’s trafficking statute, still working its way through the Ninth Circuit on remand, is a useful preview of how messy and incremental this process is likely to be even on questions that look, at first glance, more straightforward than Full Faith and Credit.25
When Supreme Court review eventually comes, and this article’s analysis suggests it probably must, the outcome is genuinely uncertain rather than doctrinally preordained in either direction. That conclusion is itself worth something, because it means the confident predictions currently offered by advocates on both sides deserve more scepticism than they usually get. What is not uncertain is the stakes. If the Court sides with enforcing states, shield laws’ refusal-to-enforce provisions become largely symbolic, and providers in access states face real, collectible liability for care they reasonably believed their own state fully protected — a result likely to chill interstate telehealth provision considerably, regardless of how many states keep shield statutes on the books. If the Court instead sides with shield-law states, it will have confirmed that Dobbs’s promise of returning abortion policy “to the states” meant, in practice, that a state’s authority stops at its own border even when its residents’ access to the underlying service does not — a genuinely significant statement about the limits of state police power at a moment when medical care, unlike the patient receiving it, can cross a state line without a body ever moving.
Either outcome will reshape more than abortion law. It will reshape how interstate telehealth generally relates to state regulatory authority, in fields well beyond reproductive medicine.26 That is the real reason this dispute deserves closer attention than its narrow procedural history so far — one dismissed New York enforcement action, and two newer suits still working their way through Texas courts — might otherwise suggest.
Reference(S):
1Sneha Dey, ‘Judge sides with New York clerk in early test of state’s abortion shield law’ The Texas Tribune (Austin, 31 October 2025); Chris Walker, ‘Judge Dismisses Texas Bid to Enforce Abortion Judgment Against New York Doctor’ JURIST (4 November 2025).
2NY Exec Law § 837-x.
3State of Texas v Carpenter (Dist Ct, Collin County, Tex, default judgment entered 14 February 2025) .The case number not independently verified; details as reported in secondary sources, see( n 1).
4Judge Dismisses Texas Bid to Enforce Abortion Judgment Against New York Doctor’ (n 1); Paxton v Bruck (NY Sup Ct, Ulster County, 31 October 2025) (Gandin J) (unreported).
5Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 US 215 (2022).
6David S Cohen, ‘The Origin and Future of Shield Laws’ (2026) 94 UMKC L Rev [pinpoint unavailable].
7Idaho Code § 18-623; Matsumoto v Labrador, 122 F4th 787 (9th Cir 2024).
8Cohen (n 6).
9Center for Reproductive Rights, ‘Interstate Shield Laws’ (Center for Reproductive Rights, 2025) <https://reproductiverights.org/resources/interstate-shield-laws/> accessed 19 July 2026.
10Heritage Foundation, ‘Abortion “Shield” Laws Undermine Interstate Comity and Medical Practice and Raise Constitutional Questions’ (Heritage Foundation, 30 December 2024) <https://www.heritage.org/life/report/abortion-shield-laws-undermine-interstate-comity-and-medical-practice-and-raise> accessed 19 July 2026.
11ibid.
12ibid.
13Carrie N Baker, ‘The Next Phase of the Abortion Wars: Targeting Pills, Helpers and Patients’ Ms Magazine (12 February 2026) <https://msmagazine.com/2026/02/12/abortion-bans-pills-state-shield-laws-fetal-personhood/> accessed 19 July 2026.
14Fauntleroy v Lum, 210 US 230 (1908).
15Huntington v Attrill, 146 US 657 (1892).
16Huntington v Attrill (n 15) 673-74.
17Texas Health and Safety Code § 171.208 (private civil enforcement provision modelled on the Texas Heartbeat Act).
18Paxton v Bruck (n 4).
19ibid; Judge Dismisses Texas Bid to Enforce Abortion Judgment Against New York Doctor (n 1) . The article notes that Gandin J expressly declined to reach the Full Faith and Credit question because Paxton had not squarely put the constitutionality of the shield law in issue.
20BMW of North America Inc v Gore, 517 US 559 (1996).
21Bigelow v Virginia, 421 US 809 (1975). 22Texas v Lynch (n 5); Texas v Aid Access (n 6). 23Texas v Aid Access (n 6).
24Center for Reproductive Rights, ‘Reproductive Rights Litigation Since Roe Fell: Looking Ahead’ (Center for Reproductive Rights, 10 June 2026) <https://reproductiverights.org/resources/reproductive-rights-litigation- HYPERLINK “https://reproductiverights.org/resources/reproductive-rights-litigation-since-“since- roe-fell-looking-ahead/> accessed 19 July 2026.
25Matsumoto v Labrador (n 7) 805-15.
26Cohen (n 8).
