Washington- The first U.S. Supreme Court merits brief filed by a Playboy playmate is a forceful -- though somewhat confusing -- plea to abolish a legal rule that, attorneys for Anna Nicole Smith argue, "is being used to restrict federal jurisdiction in broad and unprecedented ways."
Applying the so-called probate exception, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year vacated an award of $88.5 million to Smith in a fraud case she filed against her stepson, E. Pierce Marshall, as part of a bankruptcy proceeding.
Smith claimed her late husband, oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, had promised to leave her half his fortune and that Pierce had tried to swindle her out of it. Because probate of the elder Marshall's will was pending in a Texas state court, the 9th Circuit said a federal judge should not have heard the fraud claim.
The Supreme Court brief contends the probate exception is an example of "a would-be doctrinal rule or test [that] finds its way into our case law through simple repetition of a phrase -- however fortuitously coined."
The "single, amorphous, undifferentiated" exception has become "unmoored from its origins and has no discernible limiting principles," Smith's lawyers say, and "The Court should reject [it] as a basis for determining federal jurisdiction."
Things get confusing as the lawyers attempt to show that Smith's fraud claim is, in effect, an exception to the probate exception.
The claim, they stress at one point, "has no direct relation" to the Texas probate case since Smith was seeking to recover damages from Pierce Marshall individually, not his father's estate. "Congress intended to confer broad federal jurisdiction over all bankruptcy-related claims," they say.
But the brief also refers to probate courts not having exclusive jurisdiction over "bankruptcy-related probate matters" and "issues and assets common to bankruptcy and probate proceedings."
At least Smith now has the backing of the Bush administration. The solicitor general has filed arguments on her behalf and wants to take part in the Feb. 28 oral arguments before the Supreme Court.
In the probate court, a Houston jury ruled in 2001 that Smith was not entitled to any proceeds from the estate.
