Court Opinion

ID: 9431245
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:31:46.853743+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:16:48.265755
License: Public Domain

*492Chief Justice Rehnquist,
dissenting.
In Texaco, Inc. v. Short, 454 U. S. 516 (1982), the Court upheld against challenge under the Due Process Clause an Indiana statute providing that severed mineral interests which had not been used for a period of 20 years lapsed and reverted to the surface owner unless the mineral owner filed a statement of claim in the appropriate county office. In the present case Oklahoma has enacted a statute providing that a contractual claim against a decedent’s estate is barred if not presented as a claim within two months of the publication of notice advising creditors of the commencement of probate proceedings. The Court holds the Oklahoma statute unconstitutional.
Obviously there is a great difference between the 20-year time limit in the Indiana statute and the 2-month time limit in the Oklahoma statute, but the Court does not rest the constitutional distinction between .the cases on this fact. Instead, the constitutional distinction is premised on the absence in Texaco, Inc., of the “significant state action” present in this case. In the words of the Court:
“The nonclaim statute becomes operative only after probate proceedings have been commenced in state court. The court must appoint the executor or executrix before notice, which triggers the time bar, can be given. Only after this court appointment is made does the statute provide for any notice; §331 directs the executor or executrix to publish notice ‘immediately’ after appointment.” Ante, at 487.
Just why the due process implications of these two cases should turn upon the “activity” of the Oklahoma probate court is not made clear. Surely from the point of view of the claimant — for whom, after all, the Due Process Clause is designed to benefit — the difference between having the time bar to his claim activated by a notice published by a court-appointed executor, as it was here, and having the time bar *493activated by acquisition of the mineral interest, as it was in Indiana, makes little if any difference.
The owner of a mineral interest in Indiana who neither made any use of it for 20 years nor filed a statement of claim, would lose a quiet title action brought in the Indiana courts against him by the surface owner because those courts would apply the 20-year statute of limitations. The appellant in the present case lost a suit in the Oklahoma courts because those courts applied the 2-month statute of limitations contained in the Oklahoma probate statute. Why there is “state action” in the latter case, but not in the former, remains a mystery which is in no way elucidated by the Court’s opinion. The factual differences which the Court points out, showing that the probate court is “intimately involved” in the application of the Oklahoma nonclaim statute, seem to me trivial.
Probate proceedings have been traditionally uncontested and administrative, designed to transfer assets from someone who has died to his successors. Before making these transfers, probate codes universally require that the estate settle the debts of the decedent, and to do this it is necessary that claims against the estate be marshaled and proved. Ante, at 479-480. Once the debts of the estate are paid, the necessary steps can be taken to distribute the remainder of the property.
Occasionally there may be a disputed claim against the estate, which is then in most jurisdictions tried like any other civil suit. Occasionally there may be a dispute over the validity of the will, with a resultant will contest. Occasionally there may be objections to the account of the executor or the administrator, which are then in most jurisdictions heard and decided by the probate court. But by and large, the typical probate proceeding — and the one involved in the instant case seems to have followed that pattern — is uncontested, and the publication of notice to creditors simply shortens the otherwise applicable statute of limitations.
*494The “intimate involvement” of the probate court in the present case was entirely of an administrative nature.
Would this Court have struck down the Indiana mineral lapse statute involved in Texaco, Inc., if that statute had provided — as an additional protection to mineral owners — that a state official should publish notice to all mineral owners of the effect of the operation of the lapse statute? I find it difficult to believe that would be the case, and yet the thrust of the Court’s reasoning today points in that direction. Virtually meaningless state involvement, or lack of it, rather than the effect of the statute in question on the rights of the party whose claim is cut off, is held dispositive.
The Court observes that in Oklahoma, it is the court-ordered publication of notice that triggers the running of the statute of limitations. This judicial involvement, the Court concludes, is inconsistent with the “self-executing feature,” of the time bar in Texaco, Inc. Ante, at 487. This reading of the term “self-executing” is, I believe, out of context and contrary to common sense. That term refers only to the absence of a judicial or other determination that itself extinguishes the claimant’s rights. This is made clear by the Texaco, Inc., Court’s juxtaposition of “the self-executing feature of the [Indiana] statute and a subsequent judicial determination that a particular lapse did in fact occur.” 454 U. S., at 533. Certainly the Oklahoma provision is more like the former than the latter, and there is no reason to conclude that the perfunctory administrative involvement of the Oklahoma probate court triggers a greater level of due process protection.
Appellant also claims that the 2-month period provided by Oklahoma law, even if deemed to be a statute of limitations, is too short to afford due process. The Court does not reach that question, and neither do I.