15-1031 Howell v. Howell

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US Supreme Court

Case Name: Howell v. Howell

Case No.: 15-1031

A state court may not order a veteran to indemnify a divorced spouse for the loss in the divorced spouse’s portion of the veteran’s retirement pay caused by the veteran’s waiver of retirement pay to receive service-related disability benefits. This Court’s decision in Mansell v. Mansell, 490 U. S. 581, determines the outcome here. There, the Court held that federal law completely pre-empts the States from treating waived military retirement pay as divisible community property. Id., at 594–595. The Arizona Supreme Court attempted to distinguish Mansell by emphasizing the fact that the veteran’s waiver in that case took place before the divorce proceeding while the waiver here took place several years after the divorce. This temporal difference highlights only that John’s military pay at the time it came to Sandra was subject to a future contingency, meaning that the value of Sandra’s share of military retirement pay was possibly worth less at the time of the divorce. Nothing in this circumstance makes the Arizona courts’ reimbursement award to Sandra any the less an award of the portion of military pay that John waived in order to obtain disability benefits. That the Arizona courts referred to her interest in the waivable portion as having “vested” does not help: State courts cannot “vest” that which they lack the authority to give. Neither can the State avoid Mansell by describing the family court order as an order requiring John to “reimburse” or to “indemnify” Sandra, rather than an order dividing property, a semantic difference and nothing more. Regardless of their form, such orders displace the federal rule and stand as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the purposes and objectives of Congress. Family courts remain free to take account of the contingency that some military retirement pay might be waived or take account of reductions in value when calculating or recalculating the need for spousal support. Here, however, the state courts made clear that the original divorce decree divided the whole of John’s military pay, and their decisions rested entirely upon the need to restore Sandra’s lost portion

Reversed and remanded

Concur:

Dissent:

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Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.