Yesterday we introduced the mammoth Prizzia case, which bootstrapped support jurisdiction out of custody jurisdiction in an attempt to do complete justice in a case where the wife was in Hungary and the husband was here in Virginia, and we looked at the holdings related to child custody and support. Today we look at its holdings on property-division jurisdiction and classification.
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— WAIVER OF RIGHTS — PROPERTY JURISDICTION — WHAT ABOUT SUBJECT-MATTER JURISDICTION? But the Court wasn’t through with jurisdiction issues. It set forth a long and learned disquisition about all those esoteric abstract jurisdictional concepts that could make a plain old country lawyer’s head swim. The court said that the wife waived her claim that the trial court didn’t have subject matter jurisdiction to make a property division and distribution since she hadn’t raised that point in the trial court. The long discussion of how subject-matter jurisdiction is a peculiar creature that metamorphoses into “potential jurisdiction” and “active jurisdiction,” on some things, and propagates a host of other little jurisdictions, and then how that is why the old rule that lack of subject-matter jurisdiction can be raised at any time doesn’t actually mean that, because those sub-jurisdictions that flow from the big one aren’t that way at all, really, is something that the reader here will be spared, and is referred to the full text. But suffice it to say that the court ends up saying that well, those jurisdictional matters like the authority to distribute property, which are statutory prerequisites, can after all be waived by non-objection.
— PROPERTY DIVISION — THE “GIFT FOR LOVE” EXCEPTION TO THE SOURCE- OF-FUNDS STATUTE. Everybody who was involved in the drafting of Virginia’s source-of-funds-credit statute has properly had the uneasy feeling, as the case law develops, that the little “except it be a gift” fillip at the end might end up making the exception swallow the rule and kill off all the normal and classic cases of source-of-funds recognition when people have bought real estate with separate-property money for the down payment. And those with misgivings have probably often wondered how often the obsession with the gift exception ends up totally blotting out the statutory rule that gifts between spouses are still marital property, if courts are going to then start holding that because it is a gift it then becomes the separate property of the recipient spouse. (See Code §20-107.3A(ii)). Anyway, in this case the Court was convinced it had found a gift made for love. Everybody remembers Joe Thiesmann and the cross-examiner’s cunning questions that got him to admit that one reason he put his wife’s name on the title to the farm was that he loved her, but in this case the Court of Appeals extends that rule to love of a house. Yes, the Court of Appeals finds, as did the trial court, that when you add together all the indicators, they’ve got a genuine case of house love, and therefore of gift-giving, here. And when the Court of Appeals explains the sufficient evidence to wipe out Mr. Prizzia’s source-of-funds claim, we see that the whole thing was marital because (1 it was jointly titled, (2) they agreed together to pay off the mortgage, and they did that because “they loved the house,” and (3) they then allocated the way in which they spent their money to achieve the desired goal of paying off that mortgage. So now, if you have the normal sort of married couple’s case you should sit down and give some long and sober thought to whether there is any room for a source-of-funds rule left.
— PROPERTY CLASSIFICATION — HOUSE-LOVE — FACT OR LAW?: And finally, just in case there was any doubt, the Court clears up one basic legal question in equitable distribution law: trial courts’ decisions classifying property as separate, marital or mixed are findings of fact. Therefore they can’t be reversed on appeal unless plainly wrong or unsupported by evidence.
— PROPERTY DIVISION AND CUSTODY (VISITATION) ENFORCEMENT: Now the wife, staying safely in Hungary all this time, and taking her appeal to the Virginia courts, did not afford the father in Virginia his court-ordered visitation with the kids. But when the trial court got punitive about this, and decided it would condition the wife’s receipt of her share of the marital property on visitation compliance, it exceeded its authority, the Court of Appeals says. That’s right, though trial courts have discretion to determine how divorcing parties’ respective shares of the marital property will be paid out, they can’t mix custody law and property division law like this. Divorce jurisdiction is purely statutory, and if the General Assembly had wanted judges to be able to enforce visitation that way, they would have said so.
