BREEDLOVE VS. BREEDLOVE (CHILD SUPPORT)

Statutes cited

Key holdings

Practitioner summary

By the Court, Manoukian, C.J. (Mowbray, Steffen, and Gunderson, JJ., concurring). After the respondent-father defaulted on Indiana child support, the appellant-mother obtained and recorded in Clark County an approximately $90,000 arrearage judgment. The father transferred his home into a trust (later set aside as fraudulent) and then filed a homestead exemption under NRS 115.010, and the district court held the exemption enforceable against the mother's support judgment. Reversing, the court acknowledged that a strictly technical reading of NRS 115.010 would not place the mother within a listed statutory exception, but held that such a reading would lead to absurd results contravening the legislature's intent. Homestead laws exist to protect families from creditors they cannot pay; that rationale does not apply when a former spouse or child seeks to enforce court-ordered support. A former family member enforcing a support judgment is not the kind of creditor from whom the legislature sought to protect homesteaders, and the homesteader is not the kind of debtor the laws were meant to protect (following Bickel v. Bickel (Ariz. Ct. App. 1972) and Winter v. Winter (Neb. 1914); declining to follow Yager v. Yager (Cal. 1936) and Putz v. Putz (Okla. 1977)). The court emphasized the father's solvency and that he acquired the home after defaulting. Reversed and remanded.

In plain language

A couple divorced in Indiana in 1968 after having five children together. The mother got custody of all five, and the father was ordered to pay $175 a week in child support. He stopped paying. By 1980 the mother had obtained an Indiana judgment for roughly $90,000 in unpaid support plus attorney's fees. She recorded that judgment in Clark County, Nevada, where the father - a Las Vegas medical doctor - lived, and tried for years to collect. The father fought hard to avoid paying. First he put his Las Vegas home into a family trust; a court set that trust aside as a fraud designed to defeat the mother's collection efforts. Then he filed a homestead exemption on the home under Nevada law, which normally protects a family home from being seized by creditors. The mother asked the court to rule that the homestead exemption did not block her support judgment. The trial court refused, holding the father could use the homestead exemption to shield his home. The Nevada Supreme Court reversed. Read strictly, the homestead statute did not list the mother's situation as an exception. But the court held that reading the statute so technically would produce an absurd result and defeat the legislature's purpose. Homestead laws exist to protect families from creditors they cannot pay. When an ex-spouse or child is trying to collect court-ordered support, that protective purpose no longer applies - a family member enforcing a support judgment is not the kind of creditor the law was meant to guard against. The court rejected the father's argument that his second family (his new wife and her children, who lived in the home) deserved protection: he owed his first family support long before he remarried and cannot use a new marriage as a shield. The court noted his argument was especially weak given he was financially solvent and had bought the $160,000 home after he had already defaulted on support. The homestead exemption could not be used to defeat the child support judgment.