WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday against the estate of Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy Playmate whose marriage to the Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, 63 years her senior, led to an epic set of lawsuits between her and his son.
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Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press
Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy Playmate and reality television star, at the Supreme Court in 2006. She died a year later.
All of the principals in the drama have by now died, but the case lived on long enough to give rise to a significant and closely divided ruling on the separation of powers in the context of bankruptcy.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, held unconstitutional a provision of the bankruptcy laws that authorized bankruptcy judges to hear some kinds of claims. Because bankruptcy judges do not have the protections of life tenure guaranteed by Article III of the Constitution, the chief justice wrote, they may not decide “a common law cause of action, when the action neither derives from nor depends on any agency regulatory regime.”
That had the effect of overturning a bankruptcy court award to Ms. Smith, whose real name was Vickie Lynn Marshall, that at one point exceeded $400 million. She had asserted that Mr. Marshall’s son E. Pierce Marshall had wrongfully interfered with a gift she had expected from his father.
Chief Justice Roberts cited both Dickens’s “Bleak House” and foundational constitutional principles in explaining the decision. Under a contrary ruling, he said, “Article III would be transformed from the guardian of individual liberty and separation of powers we have long recognized into mere wishful thinking.
Still, he said, the decision “does not change all that much.” It was, he wrote, a matter of principle. “A statute may no more lawfully chip away at the authority of the judicial branch than it may eliminate it entirely,” the chief justice wrote.
Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority opinion.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer dissented, saying the majority had elevated form over substance and should have instead considered the case pragmatically. He said the magnitude of the intrusion on the judicial branch was minimal, while the costs to the system of insisting that claims like Ms. Smith’s be heard on federal district courts were daunting.
“A constitutionally required game of jurisdictional Ping-Pong between courts,” he wrote, “would lead to inefficiency, increased cost, delay and needless additional suffering among those faced with bankruptcy.”
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the dissent in the case, Stern v. Marshall, No. 10-179.
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