Court Opinion

ID: 9698848
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 20:01:17.785367+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:44.039765
License: Public Domain

Morse, J.,
concurring and dissenting. The opinion authored by Justice Dooley and joined by Justice Gibson would hold that the family court does not have jurisdiction to award relief on the promissory note husband made out to wife and would require wife to institute a debt collection action in superior court. My opinion, which is joined by Justice Johnson, would remand the matter to the family court for reconsideration of the property distribution in light of our reversal of the family court’s ruling construing the postnuptial agreement.
The Court’s two-two tie appears to have left the parties with an unenviable choice between courthouse doors, with no assurance that the door they choose will be deemed the right one should the matter come before us again. But in fact we do not ask the parties to guess which court is the lady and which is the tiger. The safe choice, if a dispute develops, is the superior court. In my view, the superior court would have concurrent jurisdiction to decide the enforceability of the promissory note.
*537I write separately because, in my opinion, the family court has the authority to determine the enforceability of contracts between divorcing parties as part of the property settlement. I believe that requiring parties in a divorce action to adjudicate such contracts in another forum would impose a nonsensical burden upon them and would contradict the underlying purpose of the legislation creating the family court — to bring into a single court all proceedings involving the family unit. See 4 V.S.A. § 454. Requiring the parties to file suits in two forums to adjudicate this rather straightforward divorce would be an especially odd result in this case because neither party suggested it. The only issue the parties disputed in the family court was whether the postnuptial agreement released husband from paying interest. Husband has never challenged the existence of the debt or its enforceability apart from the postnuptial agreement. For that reason alone, the family court should distribute the debt as it would any other marital property, including marital debts owed to third parties.
Even if husband disputed owing his wife interest on the note, I believe the family court should have ancillary jurisdiction to resolve the dispute between the parties as incidental to its primary duty of distributing the marital property. Ancillary jurisdiction is defined as the power of the court “to adjudicate and determine matters incidental to the exercise of its primary jurisdiction of an action.” See Black’s Law Dictionary 79 (5th ed. 1979). The adjudication of divorces, of course, is one of the civil matters within the family court’s jurisdiction, 4 V.S.A. § 454(4), and the distribution of the parties’ property, including any debts, is a primary part of the court’s jurisdictional duty in divorce proceedings. 15 V.S.A. § 751(a) (family court must “settle the rights of the parties to their property” by “equitably” dividing it; all property owned by either or both parties, “however and whenever acquired, shall be subject to the jurisdiction of the court”). For the family court to fulfill its statutory duty to distribute marital property, it would necessarily have to adjudicate any contracts between the parties that directly affect the property. See Bereman v. Bereman, 645 P.2d 1155, 1161 (Wyo. 1982) (cancellation of debt owed by one spouse to another in property-settlement order was not abuse of discretion). Determining the existence and value of marital property, including *538any debts owed between the parties, is an indispensable prerequisite to applying the criteria under 15 V.S.A. § 751(b).
Not only is the family court’s jurisdiction broad regarding divorce matters, but it also “has all of the equitable and other powers of the superior court as to civil matters within its jurisdiction, except as specifically limited by statute.” 4 V.S.A. § 453(a) (emphasis added).1 No statute limits the family court’s power to construe contracts in furtherance of its authority to distribute property. In short, the statutory provisions, and the case law interpreting them, give the family court the authority in a divorce action, as the superior court once had, to distribute marital debts owed by the parties to third persons or to each other. Further, when the contract is between the divorcing parties, the court has ancillary jurisdiction to construe the terms and enforceability of the contract in furtherance of its duty to distribute marital property.
Handling such contracts within divorce proceedings is the most practical way to proceed in the course of dividing the property of divorcing parties. It would not make sense for us to prevent the family court, which was specifically created to adjudicate divorces, from construing agreements concerning marital property and from distributing that property based on those agreements and the relevant statutory criteria. The two-forum shopping suggested by my colleagues would hamper judicial economy, greatly increase the expense and delay of divorce litigation, and provide one warring party more ammunition to harass the other. And all of this for no good reason. A family court judge is just as competent as a superior court judge to adjudicate such matters. Magee v. Magee, 519 A.2d 994, 996 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1987) (“Obviously, the Family Division judge is equally competent to decide the action in assumpsit... relating to support, medical expenses and education, founded on contract law under a separation agreement, as he is to determine the-same matters under statutory and common law, pursuant to a complaint in support.”).
My colleagues agree that some contracts are subject to the jurisdiction of the family court. See Lewis v. Lewis, 149 Vt. 19, *53922, 538 A.2d 170, 172 (1987) (the trial court must give great weight to any agreements between the parties dividing property); Bassler v. Bassler, 156 Vt. 353, 361, 593 A.2d 82, 87 (1991) (antenuptial agreement is enforceable if it is fair and spouses entered into it voluntarily and with full knowledge of each other’s financial status). Indeed, in this case we presume that the family court was authorized to construe the postnuptial agreement. I fail to grasp why the family court would be empowered to construe the postnuptial agreement but would not be permitted to determine the enforceability of the parties’ promissory note. Like most postnuptial or antenuptial agreements, the promissory note affects the equitable distribution of the parties’ marital property and therefore should be handled by the family court.
At one point, my colleagues suggest that the family court could bypass the jurisdictional barrier by awarding the interest debt to husband, but later reject this alternative because the postnuptial agreement prevents that result. They view this case as “unusual,” because it is “a debt collection action between a creditor and debtor who happen to be married.” In their words, these married people “never ‘married’ their financial affairs.” This view, I suspect, may surprise some. Most marriages that end in divorce could be characterized in analogous ways. At any rate, such a view begs the question of what issues are properly decided in family court and whether, and to what degree, the parties’ contractual agreement should be enforced.
My colleagues rely heavily on two Vermont cases in support of their view of the family court’s limited jurisdiction. In one of those cases, Ward v. Ward, 155 Vt. 242, 248, 583 A.2d 577, 581 (1990), we held that the divorcing parties’ tort claims and counterclaims sounding in assault and battery and emotional distress could not be joined into a divorce action. Ward is controlling here. Our holding in that case was based on the fact that tort claims are distinct from the issues involved in a divorce proceeding in the sense that joining them would implicate such procedures as discovery and trial by jury, which are not available in a divorce proceeding and would delay resolution of the divorce. Id. at 246-47, 583 A.2d at 580-81. In Ward, we precluded the family court from considering the parties’ tortious conduct as a joined tort claim, but not from considering such conduct in arriving at an equitable distribution of property. We *540have never ruled that issues of spousal cruelty, for example, could not be considered in dividing marital property. Id. at 244, 583 A.2d at 579; see 15 V.S.A. § 751(b)(12) (court may consider respective merits of parties). Yet, taken at face value, my colleagues’ narrow view of the family court’s jurisdiction appears to create some doubt even in this area.
Although our position in Ward is not universally accepted, see Simmons v. Simmons, 773 P.2d 602, 604 (Colo. Ct. App. 1988) (there is “no clear majority position” among other jurisdictions on whether actionable torts between married parties can or must be litigated in divorce proceedings), I joined in the Ward decision and still agree with its holding. But the situation here is the reverse of Ward. Neither party sought to join a contract action with the divorce. Nor did the parties attempt to invoke the jurisdiction of the family court beyond that permitted by law. In order to divide the parties’ property, it was just as necessary for the court to decide whether husband owed wife interest under the promissory note as it would have been to decide whether he had abused her, if that had been an issue.
Neither does the other Vermont case relied on by my colleagues, In re M.C.P., 153 Vt 275, 571 A.2d 627 (1989), undermine the family court’s jurisdiction here. In that case, after noting that the controlling statute provided jurisdiction over proceedings concerning the child in need, we held that the juvenile court had “no jurisdiction to consider side issues that do not concern the status of the juvenile.” Id. at 303, 571 A.2d at 642. As we noted, strict adherence to the statute was necessary “to ensure a single-minded focus on the juvenile” and to prevent the resources of the juvenile court from being “diluted to resolve a separate dispute that had no impact on the juvenile.” Id. Here, to the contrary, the distribution of the parties’ property, including the debt husband owed wife, is at the very heart of the divorce and the family court’s jurisdiction. Thus, concerns over avoiding potential delay and unnecessary collateral litigation, which weighed against broader jurisdiction in Ward and M.C.P., weigh distinctly in favor of family court jurisdiction.
My colleagues cite several other cases from other family-court jurisdictions for the proposition that “general civil claims, even between spouses, cannot be litigated in the family court.” These cases do not stand for such a broad proposition. Some hold merely that family courts have no jurisdiction over post-*541divorce contract actions between former spouses concerning agreements that were never incorporated into divorce judgments. For example, Sims v. Sims, 348 S.E.2d 835 (S.C. 1986), arose from the husband’s action to set aside a conveyance brought two years after the divorce. In a per curiam opinion, the South Carolina Supreme Court held thát the former husband had to seek enforcement of the alleged agreement in the common pleas court because the agreement had never been incorporated into the divorce decree, and no statute gave the husband “an independent right to institute a separate action in the family court to determine his interest in the property since the requested relief is not incidental to the divorce decree.” Id. at 836 (emphasis added).
Later cases from South Carolina make it clear that Sims stands merely for the proposition that South Carolina statutes do “not give a former spouse the right to institute a separate action in family court where the relief requested is not incidental to the divorce decree.” Eichor v. Eichor, 351 S.E.2d 353, 354 (S.C. Ct. App. 1986) (citing Sims) (emphasis added); see Brown v. Brown, 368 S.E.2d 475, 477 (S.C. Ct. App. 1988) (citing Sims, court held that “family court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to settle a dispute between spouses involving their respective interests in property, unless the determination is incident to an action requesting an alteration of their marital status”) (emphasis added); Roberts v. Roberts, 361 S.E.2d 341, 342 (S.C. Ct. App. 1987) (because family court’s decree approving settlement agreement is “now final,” subject matter jurisdiction regarding agreement, including interpretation of its terms, rests with circuit rather than family court).2
Cases from other family-court jurisdictions are similarly limited. For example, Sanders v. Sanders, 570 A.2d 1189 (Del. *5421990), involved a post-divorce action in which the wife sought to rescind a property division agreement that had not been merged in the divorce decree. The court held that the family court did not have subject matter jurisdiction “to entertain petitions to rescind contractual agreements outside the scope of divorce or annulment proceedings.” Id. at 1191 (emphasis added). The court, however, specifically stated that the wife could still bring her petition for ancillary relief in the family court by filing a Rule 60(b) motion to reopen the divorce. Id. at 1192.
A single brief opinion from South Carolina is cited in support of my colleagues’ conclusion that “not all cases from other states involve independent proceedings in which the family court did not have proper claims before it.” That case, McGrew v. McGrew, 257 S.E.2d 743 (S.C. 1979), does not undermine my position because it did not involve a divorce proceeding, and thus did not address whether the family court had authority to construe the parties’ contract in furtherance of its authority to divide marital property. In that case, the parties were separated but not divorced. The wife instituted an action to collect child support arrearages based on a separation agreement that had never been incorporated into a divorce order or approved by the court. The court held that the family court was without jurisdiction to determine the arrearages due under the separation agreement because “such liability was based solely upon the contract between the parties.” Id. at 744. Here, in contrast, we have a divorce proceeding in which the family court has the power, indeed the duty, to distribute the parties’ property.
I find it ironic that my colleagues’ view would preclude the family court from allocating contractual debts between divorcing parties, when we have accepted the practice of the divorce court determining, and allocating between the parties, the debts one or both of them allegedly owe to third parties. See Sullivan v. Sullivan, 137 Vt. 544, 546, 409 A.2d 561, 562 (1979) (court ordered husband to relieve wife of liability on note signed by both parties during marriage); cf. Warren v. Warren, 800 S.W.2d 730, 731 (Ark. Ct. App. 1990) (despite lack of express statutory authority, chancellor has power to allocate marital debts). If my colleagues’ intent is to restrict this practice as well, the family court jurisdiction is, indeed, a dwindling resource.
*543This case is even less problematic than cases involving third-party debts because the parties to the contract are before the family court as the divorcing parties; thus, the court has even more reason to determine the merits of the contract and to distribute the debt. See Lubecki v. Ashcroft, 557 A.2d 1208, 1213 (R.I.1989) (both superior court and family court may have concurrent jurisdiction to resolve contractual disputes between married parties, “and the principles of . . . practicality should generally be applied in determining which court is better able to furnish complete relief”)3; cf. Brooks v. Minn, 836 P.2d 1081, 1085 (Haw. 1992) (decree-judgment creditor can enforce collection of family court-ordered property settlement payments either through circuit or family court). As the Rhode Island Supreme Court so aptly stated: “To resurrect the eighteenth-century Chinese wall between different tribunals (then, law and equity) would serve neither the principles of judicial economy nor the right of the parties litigant to a speedy and just remedy in resolution of their disputes.” Lubecki, 557 A.2d at 1214.
In sum, I agree that the family court’s interpretation of the parties’ postnuptial agreement is erroneous. I would reverse the family court order and remand the matter for reconsideration of whether the agreement is enforceable under the Bassler test in light of the reversal, and for distribution of the debt. The debt in question is fairly significant and conceivably could affect the family court’s determination regarding the fairness of the postnuptial agreement, given the circumstances of the parties. Assuming that on remand the family court found the agreement to be enforceable notwithstanding the existence of the debt, I would permit the court to distribute the debt. Distribution of the debt would not violate the postnuptial agreement. That agreement merely expresses the parties’ intent to release each other from dower and curtesy.

 The family court has the same powers over its proceedings as that vested in the superior court by statute or common law. 4 V.S.A. § 453(b).

 In June 1986, before Sims was decided, the following South Carolina statutory provision became effective: “The family courts of this State have subject matter jurisdiction over all contracts relating to property which is involved in a proceeding under this article and over the construction and enforcement of those contracts.” S.C. Code Ann. § 20-7-479 (Law. Co-op. Supp. 1993). Apparently, this provision was part of a general clarification of family court law. Because none of the cases cited above mention the provision, the holdings therein do not appear to be based on it. In any event, neither the statutory law nor the case law of South Carolina precludes the family court from construing marital agreements within the context of a divorce proceeding, as the dissent suggests.

 My colleagues cite Lubecki v. Ashcroft, 557 A.2d 1208, 1213. (R.I. 1989), and Kagen v. Kagen, 236 N.E.2d 475, 480, 289 N.Y.S.2d 195, 199 (1968), for the proposition that “[a] number of states have specifically provided for concurrent jurisdiction.” In neither case, however, was concurrent jurisdiction explicitly provided by statute. Rather, the courts interpreted the statutes to provide concurrent jurisdiction. Similarly, I believe that our statutes provide concurrent jurisdiction here.