Here’s something for all of you law geeks out there: Anna Nicole Smith’s legal wranglings over the estate of her former husband against his son, has landed her in the Supreme Court.
Sober as always as they wrestled with the legal dispute at hand, the justices nevertheless seemed aware of stepping into an epic soap opera of the kind that could have happened only in Texas. The battle between Anna Nicole and Pierce “is quite a story,” as Justice Stephen G. Breyer observed.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted that the case “involved a substantial amount of assets,” presumably not intending any double entendre in the case of a woman who last year stripped to the waist at the MTV Australia Video Music Awards, revealing breasts covered with the MTV logo.
For his part, Pierce, 67, says that he did nothing wrong and that his stepmother is a frustrated gold digger who lost her case in a Texas court — and is now shopping for a favorable new forum in the federal courts as if she were at Neiman Marcus.
For the Supreme Court, the nub of the problem is that different courts have come down on opposite sides of the case. A federal bankruptcy judge and federal district judge in California both ruled for Anna Nicole, with the latter awarding her $88 million in 2002. But a Texas probate court had ruled in favor of Pierce in 2001.
The San Francisco-based federal appeals court ruled last year that the Texas court’s decision should trump because matters having to do with wills and estates, or probate, as the lawyers call it, belong exclusively in the state courts. Anna Nicole’s claims are just a dressed-up attempt to refight a settled will contest, the appeals court ruled.
