Harris v. Balk
1905 United States Supreme Court case
Harris v. Balk, 198 U.S. 215 (1905), was a United States Supreme Court case that exemplified the idiosyncratic types of jurisdiction state courts (and therefore plaintiffs) could assert through quasi in rem actions before International Shoe's (1945) "minimum contacts" test replaced Pennoyer's (1878) principles of "power and notice".
This case involved three parties: Harris, Balk, and Epstein. Harris owed Balk money and Balk owed Epstein money. Thus, there was no debt relationship between Harris and Epstein. Harris and Balk lived in North Carolina while Epstein lived in Maryland. Harris traveled to Maryland. While he was there, Epstein attached the debt Harris owed Balk in order for Epstein to obtain jurisdiction over Balk. Through this, Epstein hoped to obtain the debt that Balk owed him by accessing the debt Harris owed Balk. Consequently, Epstein obtained a judgment against Balk which directed Harris to pay Epstein instead of Balk.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Harris v. Balk” is 1905 United States Supreme Court case. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Harris, Balk and United, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5665163. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1905, 1945 and 1878.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harris v. Balk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.