Court Opinion

ID: 9584107
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:44:38.397091+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:06:42.384275
License: Public Domain

NEELY, Justice,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
Why did the majority wait until December 6 to file an opinion in a case heard May 14, when on average it takes this Court just over two months to decide a case? 1 Perhaps the majority is uncomfortable with the leaps in logic required to suggest (with a straight face, no less) that W.Va.Code, 48-2-l(e) and (f) [1986], Whiting v. Whiting, 183 W.Va. 451, 396 S.E.2d 413 (1990), and the case at hand are consistent with one another.
Thus, the majority have written this opinion following the third golden rule of trial lawyers.2 I will try to cut through the underbrush and explain briefly what the majority has done. As I said in my dissent in Whiting, Whiting overturned W.Va. Code, 48-2-1(e) and (f) [1986], and redefined marital property in West Virginia. Whiting 183 W.Va. at 463, 396 S.E.2d at 425 (Neely, J. dissenting). In doing so, Whiting created the problem presented in this case. Under Whiting, a spouse who brings property into a marriage and (in an effort to promote marital harmony) places that property into jointly titled real estate or a jointly titled account, loses half of that property forever, even if his wife runs off with a drummer whilst he works two jobs to raise and educate the children. Whiting was an easy case in which to make such a decision because the spouse who lost half of the property was the man. But, as the old cliché goes, easy cases make bad law.
Now the majority is faced with a less sympathetic case in which the losing party under Whiting would be the woman — oh my God, we wanted it shaggy, but not that shaggy! Instead of applying Whiting as it was written or, better yet, admitting that Whiting was wrong, the majority creates a 50% exception to Whiting into which they *678can push all women who may title property in their husband’s name. Thus, like a child standing over a broken cookie jar who still refuses to admit he should not have been reaching for the Oreos, the majority still refuse to recognize the error they committed in Whiting despite the “broken glass” that must now be picked up surreptitiously.
If the majority had said today that because they believe women are so disadvantaged in our society and so naturally incompetent, they will torture our law to temper the wind for the shorn lady lambs, they would at least have stood squarely on the rock of history and I would not be invited to ridicule. After all, in our landmark case of Moore v. Mustoe, 47 W.Va. 549, 35 S.E. 871 (1900) we said:
Woman has always been a favorite with equity, and it always throws it[s] willing arms around her to protect her from the importunity and duress of her impecunious husbands.
Moore, 47 W.Va. at 552, 35 S.E. at 873.
And (to show how history repeats itself) the great feminist legal philosopher, Cath-arine MacKinnon wrote very recently:
Women can know society because consciousness is part of it, not because of any capacity to stand outside it or oneself. This stance locates the position of consciousness, from which one knows, in the standpoint and time frame of that attempting to be known. The question is not whether objective reality exists but whether that concept accesses the is-ness of the world. Feminist epistemology asserts that the social process of being a woman is on some level the same process as that by which woman’s consciousness becomes aware of itself as such and of its world. Mind and world, as a matter of social reality, are taken as interpenetrated. Knowledge is neither a copy nor a miscopy of reality, neither representative nor misrepresentative as the scientific model would have it, but a response to living in it. Truth is in a sense a collective experience of truth, in which “knowledge” is assimilated to consciousness, a consciousness that exists as a reality in the world, not merely in the head. This epistemology does not at all deny that a relation exists between thought and some reality other than thought, or between human activity (mental or otherwise) and the products of that activity. Rather, it redefines the epistemological issue from being the scientific one, the relation between knowledge and objective reality, to a problem of the relation of consciousness to social being. [Emphasis added.]
C. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 98-99 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harv.U.Press 1989). Professor MacKinnon then, in her discussion of feminist consciousness raising, argues that women both naturally and appropriately view the world from a perspective other than objective reality. At least, I think that is what she is saying.3 Ms. MacKinnon acknowledges, then, such truisms as women don’t think about managing money the same way that men do — the exact conclusion reached by our majority today and reached unanimously by this Court in 1900 in Moore v. Mustoe.
So, instead of being blunt about this Court’s determination to make sure that women get whatever gold mine survives a nasty divorce while the men get the shaft, the majority continue to pretend that they are “interpreting” a sex neutral standard from W.Va.Code, 48-2-l(e) and (f) [1986]. They are not!
As I said in my Whiting dissent, my disagreement with the majority is based on my belief in the integral role of the family in our society. Both husbands and wives should be encouraged to do everything they can to make marriages work. Whiting encourages just the opposite. It invites spouses to play a game of “yours” versus “mine" rather than treating everything as “ours.”
*679The very act of pigeonholing property— his, hers, ours — undermines the marriage. Sedulously protecting separate property at every transfer, renewal, reinvestment or exchange will weaken a marriage by emphasizing and reemphasizing the viability of the divorce option.
Whiting, 183 W.Va. at 464, 396 S.E.2d at 426 (Neely, J. dissenting).
I understand the short-term incentives behind Whiting’s attempt at wealth redistribution; indeed, in the 1970’s I understood the short-term incentives behind wholesale nationalization in Third World countries. But thoughtless wealth redistribution didn’t work in Uganda, Zaire and Mozambique, and it won’t work in domestic relations. In the short-term those who are poor receive an infusion of money. In the long term, however, the wealth producers find ways to protect their wealth from transfer or they quit producing wealth. Problems like this are what law is all about. Sophisticated legal systems look to their society’s long term success, which is why we all have greater confidence investing in America than we do investing in Uganda.
The professional class of lawyers and doctors, possessing surpassing arrogance as they do, believe that they have a monopoly of knowledge about how the law or the human body works. Yet that’s not at all true; indeed, long ago I found that my clients often knew more about the peculiar law that applied to their businesses than I did. And, as regards the problem of joint ownership created by Whiting, next to sex, the single most interesting subject of conversation for all mankind is money. Thus, even ordinary blue collar workers have received the hot news by now about the enormous jeopardy to which a person subjects himself (or herself?) when separate property is titled in joint names.
In West Virginia, wealthy spouses will now make strong attempts to segregate their assets. In the long term, this can only be damaging to the family. The legislature understood this when it enacted W.Va.Code, 48-2-l(e) and (f) [1986],4 but *680the majority continue to ignore a statute enacted by the legislature and the dictates of common sense.
Whiting v. Whiting must be overruled!

. A minute review of the record in this case had about as much to do with today’s decision as the Nuremberg record had to do with our decision to hang Hermann Goring (see, maj. op. note 6).

. The three golden rules of trial lawyers are:
(1) If the facts are against you, argue the law;
(2) If the law is against you, argue the facts; and,
(3) If both the facts and the law are against you, confuse the hell out of the court.
The third rule, when required to stand alone, is occasionally restated as: "If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull_”

. Ms. MacKinnon undoubtedly has some very intelligent things to say, but when I read her, I have the same overwhelming sense of deprivation that I experience reading Roberto Unger. Indeed, it is a tragedy that fate has denied these great luminaries the opportunity to write in their native languages.

. W. Va.Code, 48-2-l(e) and (f) [1986], provides:
(e) "Marital property” means:
(1) All property and earnings acquired by either spouse during a marriage, including every valuable right and interest, corporeal or incorporeal, tangible or intangible, real or personal, regardless of the form of ownership, whether legal or beneficial, whether individually held, held in trust by a third party, or whether held by the parties to the marriage in some form of co-ownership such as joint tenancy or tenancy in common, joint tenancy with the right of survivorship, or any other form of shared ownership recognized in other jurisdictions without this state, except that marital property shall not include separate property as defined in subsection (f) of this section; and
(2) The amount of any increase in value in the separate property of either of the parties to a marriage, which increase results from (A) an expenditure of funds which are marital property, including an expenditure of such funds which reduces indebtedness against separate property, extinguishes liens, or otherwise increases the net value of separate property, or (B) work performed by either or both of the parties during the marriage.
The definitions of “marital property" contained in this subsection and “separate property" contained in subsection (f) of this section shall have no application outside of the provisions of this article, and the common law as to the ownership of the respective property and earnings of a husband and wife, as altered by the provisions of article three [§ 48-3-1 et seq.] of this chapter and other provisions of this code, are not abrogated by implication or otherwise, except as expressly provided for by the provisions of this article as such provisions are applied in actions brought under this article or for the enforcement of rights under this article.
(f) "Separate property” means:
(1) Property acquired by a person before marriage; or
(2) Property acquired by a person during marriage in exchange for separate property which was acquired before the marriage; or
(3) Property acquired by a person during marriage, but excluded from treatment as marital property by a valid agreement of the parties entered into before or during the marriage; or
(4) Property acquired by a party during marriage by gift, bequest, devise, descent or distribution; or
(5) Property acquired by a party during a marriage but after the separation of the parties and before the granting of a divorce, annulment or decree of separate maintenance; and
(6) Any increase in the value of separate property as defined in subdivision (1), (2), (3), (4) or (5) of this subsection which is due to inflation or to a change in market value resulting from conditions outside the control of the parties. [Emphasis added.]