MORSE VS. MORSE (TERMINATION OF PARENTAL RIGHTS)

Key holdings

Practitioner summary

This was an appeal from the denial of an NRCP 60(b) motion to set aside an adoption order, and the court affirmed. The parties had jointly executed and filed a petition for adoption in September 1979 in which both averred Nevada residency since July 1978; the district court granted the petition on September 28, 1979. In July 1981, appellant moved to set the order aside as void for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, contending respondent had not satisfied the statutory residency requirement for filing the petition. The district court denied the motion on the ground that appellant was barred or estopped from challenging its jurisdiction, and this appeal followed. The court held that the petition appellant signed "contained the facts necessary to at least ostensibly confer jurisdiction" on the district court to entertain the petition, and that there was substantial evidence appellant "acted freely and with understanding in stipulating to these facts." Accordingly, the district court properly ruled that appellant was barred, or estopped, from challenging its jurisdiction to entertain the petition for adoption. See Boisen v. Boisen, 85 Nev. 122, 451 P.2d 363 (1969); Grant v. Grant, 38 Nev. 185, 147 P. 451 (1915). The order was affirmed. (Chief Justice Manoukian and Justice Mowbray voluntarily disqualified themselves.) Note: This is an adoption/collateral-attack decision; it is indexed under termination of parental rights as the nearest available family-status category because the record concerns the validity of the decree establishing the adoptive parent-child relationship, not a contested best-interest determination.

In plain language

In early September 1979, the appellant and the respondent jointly signed and filed a "Petition for Adoption" in Clark County District Court. In that petition, both of them stated under oath that they had lived in Nevada since July 1978. On September 28, 1979, the district court granted the petition and entered an adoption order. Almost two years later, in July 1981, the appellant changed course and asked the court to set the adoption order aside. She argued the order was void because the court never had "subject matter jurisdiction" - the basic power to decide the case - because the respondent had not actually met the residency requirement needed to file an adoption petition in Nevada. The district court refused to undo the adoption. It ruled that the appellant was barred (estopped) from challenging the court's jurisdiction, because she herself had signed the petition asserting the very residency facts that gave the court jurisdiction. The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed. It explained that the adoption petition the appellant signed contained the facts needed to at least apparently give the court jurisdiction, and there was substantial evidence that she signed it freely and with understanding. Under those circumstances, she could not later attack the court's jurisdiction to have entertained the petition. The court relied on earlier decisions holding that a party who stipulates to the facts conferring jurisdiction is later estopped from disputing them.