§ 1911.Judgment; items adjudged

This section keeps a prior judgment's preclusive reach from expanding beyond what it truly decided. Only two categories of matter are deemed adjudged: what appears on the face of the former judgment to have been adjudged, and what was necessarily included in the judgment or necessary to reaching it.

That second category matters most in practice, since it reaches issues the judgment does not spell out directly but that the court had to resolve to get to its result. Anything beyond those two categories, matters merely raised, argued, or touched on without being necessary to the outcome, falls outside what the judgment conclusively settles.