Opinion ID: 2549213
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Impact of Docket Boundaries on Divorce-Related Issues

Text: ¶ 6 Interdocket boundaries cannot be invoked to restrict the tribunal's constitutional omnicompetence. [7] They are merely procedural demarcation lines separating different remedial regimes (small claims, probate, jury or non-jury cases) or dividing discrete classes of litigation (domestic, civil, criminal or the like). Because interdocket boundaries are merely remedial (rather than jurisdictional ), the district court's exercise of cognizance over any issue tendered for its judicature upon the wrong docket will not defeat its constitutionally-invested unlimited subject-matter jurisdiction. Neither may the docket boundary's extension render a judgment (or any of its parts) facially void as coram non judice. [8] Errors in crossing remedial interdocket lines, though perhaps correctible on direct appeal, [9] will not impress themselves as a fatal flaw upon the face of the judgment roll. [10] No remedial lines were crossed in this case. [11] ¶ 7 Oklahoma's jurisprudential development has led to a very early post-statehood accommodation of expanded issues cognizable within the cases placed upon what is now the family-and-domestic docket of the district court. [12] That docket has become the main channel for processing both divorce-and-family-status litigation as well as for all kinds of divorce-generated post-decree disputes. The district court's divorce-related authority includes approval of consent decrees [13] that confer upon the parties greater post-marital rights than those defined by statute. [14] There is hence no need to direct here that after remand the cause be re-processed along a different docket route. [15] ¶ 8 In sum, there is no longer any doubt about the propriety of allowing the parties in a divorce suit to expand the litigation's scope by injecting into the decisional process extra-statutory issues generated by an interspousal agreement that settles either some or all marital rights in contest. In this stage of our jurisprudential development, it is much too late to restrict the family-and-domestic docket disputes solely to rights that are statutorily defined. [16] The district court's constitutionally-derived unlimited original jurisdiction of all justiciable matters cannot be shrunk by imprisoning its range of cognizance over divorce-related issues within the parameters circumscribed by the pre-1857 English-law antecedents. [17]