Court Opinion

ID: 9797638
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 04:26:43.174441+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:57:42.678332
License: Public Domain

ORME, Judge
(concurring specially):
[ 46 I concur in the court's opinion, exeept that as to section L.A., I concur only in the result. The basis for my disagreement can be suceinetly stated.
T47 This is, as the main opinion recognizes, a very unusual case. In affirming the trial court's equitable distribution to the wife of a portion of the husband's separate property, the main opinion sweeps too broadly and employs language that might be seized upon as precedential in cases that are not so very unusual,. I do not believe the trial court's allocation can be validated merely because "Wife's efforts freed Husband to grow his premarital partnership interests," and I do not agree that "marital labor augmented Husband's partnership interests."
1 48 Instead, the court's allocation can best be affirmed in this atypical case on a theory of equitable set-off. During the time the husband devoted his energies exclusively to managing his separate interests, the wife took full charge of the financial aspects of the marital estate. Her astute efforts resulted in a considerable enriching of the marital estate and, thus, of the husband. It is entirely fair, then, that she share in some of the gain resulting from his efforts during the same period. In other words, it is only equitable, given the significant responsibilities the wife assumed, that she share in the appreciation of the husband's separate properties attributable to the part of the marriage when the parties allocated their time-their "marital time"-in a way that allowed the husband to focus exclusively on his assets while the wife was focused exclusively on their assets.1

. Actually, it might have been conceptually easier had the trial court accomplished the same fair result by simply leaving the husband with his separate property, including all of its post-marital increase in value, while explicitly dividing an appropriate part of the marital estate on other than a fifty-fifty basis in recognition of the fact the increase in the value of the marital estate was due to the wife's extraordinary efforts on behalf of the estate while the husband devoted all his energies to his separate property.