Court Opinion

ID: 9668479
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 02:16:08.353697+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:45.622640
License: Public Domain

NEUMANN, Justice,
dissenting.
For many years this Court has held that a trial court’s authority to make a just and equitable distribution of property under NDCC section 14-05-24 does not allow the court to rewrite a vah‘1 separation agreement, unless there are statutory grounds for rescission under NDCC chapter 9-09. Wolfe v. Wolfe, 391 N.W.2d 617 (N.D.1986) (citing Peterson v. Peterson, 313 N.W.2d 743 (N.D.1981)). NDCC section 9-09-02(1) permits rescission if a party’s consent was given by mistake or obtained through duress, menace, fraud, or undue influence.
In this case the trial court which reviewed Leslie’s motion to vacate the divorce judgment found that Leslie was “an intelligent person with a college degree,” and that there was “no medical evidence as to incapacitation or memory lapses.... ” The court also explicitly found there was no evidence of “fraud, deceit, coercion, or misrepresentation” by Kenneth.
In reviewing a trial court’s denial of a Rule 60(b) motion to set aside a regularly entered judgment, this Court will not determine if the trial court was substantively correct in entering the judgment from which relief is sought. We will determine only whether the trial court abused its discretion in ruling that sufficient grounds for disturbing the finality of the judgment were not established. Clooten v. Clooten, 520 N.W.2d 843 (N.D.1994).
Here the majority grants a perfunctory nod to the trial court’s determination that there were no grounds for rescission, to our standard of review, and to our prior law. *837Then, however, it ignores all three, and instead retries the ease upon a cold record, and applies a standard of unconseionability. Further, the majority seems to apply its uncon-scionability standard not to the trial court’s decision on the motion, but rather to the underlying stipulation of the parties.
While the facts in this case, especially as presented by Leslie in her appeal, seem to cry out for some sort of wise and kindly intervention, the truth is that such an intervention can be accomplished in this case only by a de novo review of the record, and by overturning our prior law. The majority’s disregard of our standard of review and its application of a nebulous unconseionability standard invites, even compels, judges to patronizingly and paternalistically meddle in the proposed stipulations of presumptively competent divorcing adults, with very little guidance or principle other than our own personal sense of what feels fair and right. That strikes me as the very essence of a government of people, rather than a government of laws. When the outcome of a case can depend not upon rules, laws and standards of review, but upon what strikes appellate judges as fair and equitable, then this Court has assumed more power than wise people ought to be comfortable exercising.
Despite my own impression that Leslie has been left with the very short end of this marital stick, I cannot conclude that the trial court which denied her Rule 60(b) motion acted arbitrarily, capriciously, unreasonably or unconscionably in doing so. While I, too, long to relieve her of the bad consequences of her hasty decisions, I am not willing to let this hard ease make bad law. I therefore, respectfully, dissent.
SANDSTROM, J., concurs.