Court Opinion

ID: 9846892
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 03:50:08.703078+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:16:56.738012
License: Public Domain

STRUCKMEYER, Justice
(dissenting).
In my opinion, the judgment of the superior court is flagrantly void for want of due process.
Although Billie Uhlmann, wife of Ernest A. Uhlmann, was named as a grantee in the deed by which the property was conveyed in fee simple, she was not named as party in the lawsuit, never made a party by service of process, and did not appear in the action. Notwithstanding, the court be*156low entered this personal judgment against her:
“IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that defendants Ernest A. Uhlmann and Billie TJhlmann, his wife, hold an undivided one-half interest in the premises hereinafter described for the benefit of plaintiff George Ellis * * (Emphasis supplied.)
That an in personam judgment may not be rendered against one who has never been a party to the litigation would seem so obvious that citation of authority should be unnecessary.
“It is a principle of general application in Anglo-American jurisprudence that one is not bound by a judgment in personam in a litigation in which he is not designated as a party or to which he has not been made a party by service of process. Pennoyer v. Neff, [5 Otto 714,] 95 U.S. 714, 24 L.Ed. 565; 1 Freeman on Judgments, 5th ed. § 407. A judgment rendered in such circumstances is not entitled to the full faith and credit which the Constitution and statute of the United States, R.S. § 905, 28 U.S.C. § 687, 28 U.S.C.A. § 687 prescribe, [citations] and judicial action enforcing it against the person or property of the absent party is not that due process which the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments require. [Citations.]” Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 at 40-41, 61 S.Ct. 115, 85 L.Ed. 22, 132 A.L.R. 741.
I concur with Justice BERNSTEIN in his analysis of the erroneous reasoning by which the majority arrive at their ultimate conclusion. I cannot, however, pass on without expressing one further thought. The most elemental considerations of fair play require that no person lose his property without the opportunity to be heard. The court-conceived assumption that a wife is represented by her husband, although the husband in fact disclaims such a representation, works a virtual destruction of the concept of community property as it is known in Arizona. Its effect is to reduce the wife’s one-half vested share in the community to a mere nominal interest. Today women in Arizona are relegated to a second-class status comparable only to the Middle Ages.
I must dissent.