Article: Anna Nicole’s Constitutional Estates Law Legacy
Dave Fagundes recently published, Anna Nicole’s Constitutional Estates Law Legacy, ACTEC Law Journal, Fall 2024. Provided below is an Abstract:
If you were alive in the early 90s and even remotely cognizant of popular culture, you remember the billboard. It featured a young model recently re-styled Anna Nicole Smith recumbent in a grassy field sporting form-fitting Guess jeans and a top revealing ample cleavage. Herplatinum blond hair and smoky stare invoked—quite intentionally—her idol, Marilyn Monroe. The billboard was so compelling that it became a public safety hazard. The Norwegian parliament debated banning it because it was causing distracted drivers to crash.
Anna Nicole’s turn as the leading Guess spokesmodel made her a world celebrity. She was discussed in the same company as leading supermodels of the time and enjoyed a few years of media favor thanks to her mix of down-home Texas simplicity and smoldering sex appeal. This moment didn’t last long. In 1994, Anna Nicole wed superannuated oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, and their yawning age difference and her perceived instrumentalism made her easy fodder for talk show ridicule. When Marshall died the next year, Anna Nicole found herself financially adrift, not only because she received nothing from Marshall’s estate but also because her incipient drug habit had alienated Guess and other sponsors.
Years of struggle followed. In 2002, she struck a deal to star in The Anna Nicole Show, one of the earliest reality television shows. Its tagline was “It’s not meant to be funny—it just is!” But twenty years on, the show appears more exploitative than humorous, showcasing Anna Nicole roaming aimlessly around Los Angeles, often visibly intoxicated, as a cadre of shady eccentrics swarm around her.
In 2005, Anna Nicole’s life moved from tragicomic to tragic. She gave birth to a daughter in November, only to have her 21-year-old son Daniel die of an overdose in her hospital room the next day. Anna Nicole never recovered from the blow, and in 2007 she too succumbed to a combination of drugs and illness and died at 39 in a Florida hotel.
Anna Nicole’s cultural legacy is conflicted. Her slow, painful public decline following her first few incandescent years of success made her a common subject of ridicule in the media. Her shocking early death made her an object lesson in the dangers of consumptive excess. Unlike her idol Marilyn Monroe, who continues to attract fascination even a half-century after her death, Anna Nicole no longer occupies a significant place in the popular consciousness.
But Anna Nicole’s story did leave a lasting mark in a way few would have imagined. Her protracted lawsuit to recover a share of the estate of her late husband spawned not one, but two, trips to the Supreme Court of the United States, and in so doing established a pair of important holdings about estates law and federal jurisdiction that continue to have salience to this day. Anna Nicole’s cultural legacy may have faded away, but her legal one remains.
This Essay examines Anna Nicole’s surprising constitutional estates legacy in three parts. First, it overviews the bitter litigation between Anna Nicole and the estate of J. Howard Marshall II. It then turns to the pair of Supreme Court cases spawned by that litigation. Part II discusses the holding and significance of Marshall v. Marshall, a successful challenge to the scope of the wills exception to federal jurisdiction. Part III discusses the holding and significance of Stern v. Marshall, which held that Article I bankruptcy judges cannot enter final judgments on state law counterclaims. In its Conclusion, the Essay reflects on the contrast between Anna Nicole’s absence from cultural memory with the impact left by the cases she litigated.
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