- 4.1.1Full Faith and Creditnot yet published The Full Faith and Credit Clause prevents the United States from fragmenting into fifty separate legal systems by requiring each state to recognize the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state — but the judicially developed distinction between judgments (nearly absolute recognition) and statutes (subject to choice-of-law balancing and public-policy exceptions) permits the interstate legal inconsistency the clause was designed to prevent.