A New Hampshire Court Cannot Vacate A Divorce Decree Simply Because The Parties Have Since Reconciled

It’s been five months since I last posted, but none of the opinions issued by the four courts that I follow – the Maine Law Court, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the New Hampshire Supreme Court, and the First Circuit – have been striking my fancy of late. That streak ends today, courtesy of the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s decision in In the Matter of Terrie Harman and Thomas McCarron, No. 2015-0273. This decision simply presents a situation too extraordinary to pass up.

Terrie Harman and Thomas McCarron were married in 1989. Unfortunately, after 25 years the marriage deteriorated and the parties were granted an uncontested decree of divorce based on irreconcilable differences in July 2014. By March 2015, however, the parties had reconciled (apparently the differences were reconcilable after all), and they jointly filed a petition to vacate the divorce decree. The trial court denied the petition on the ground that it lacked authority to vacate the decree.

On appeal, Terrie, with Thomas’ agreement, argued that the trial court erred because New Hampshire courts have the general authority to set aside, vacate, modify, and amend their orders. The New Hampshire Supreme Court agreed that New Hampshire courts possess that general authority, and stated that it had previously held that a final divorce decree could be vacated when it had been procured by fraud, accident, or mistake. The problem for Terrie was that she had asserted none of those grounds; each of those grounds calls into question the validity of the decree, and Terrie asserted not that the divorce decree was invalid, but rather that she and Thomas had subsequently reconciled.

In affirming the trial court’s decision, the Supreme Court noted that in New Hampshire, divorce is purely statutory, and, as such, the courts have only those powers conferred upon them by statute. It concluded, therefore, that because there is no statute authorizing the trial court to vacate a final divorce decree on the ground of the parties’ subsequent reconciliation, the trial court correctly held that it had no authority to vacate the decree. The remedy for Terrie and Thomas is to re-marry.

Granted, it’s an unusual fact pattern, but Harman and McCarron is a good reminder that there are limits to what actions courts can take even when the litigants are in agreement.

An Appellate Court Reminds Us That Rules Of Contract Interpretation Do Not Trump Evidence Of The Parties’ Intent

For as long as there have been contracts, there have been judges, lawyers, and parties who have struggled to divine the meaning of documents that were – shall we say – “inartfully” drafted.  To address ambiguities in such documents, common law courts have developed a host of rules of interpretation to assist in the quest for elucidation.  With its recent decision in Lynch v. Town of Pelham, No. 2013-064, the New Hampshire Supreme Court reminds us of the proper role of such rules in the interpretive process.

The dispute at issue in Lynch finds its genesis in a 1985 deed by which a trust sold land to the Town of Pelham for the development of municipal buildings.  That deed contained several restrictive covenants, including restrictions on the architectural style of the buildings to be built, but did not specify whether those covenants were appurtenant (tied to the ownership or occupancy of a particular parcel of land) or in gross (not tied to the ownership or occupancy of a particular parcel of land).
 
Years later, the Trustee took issue with the design of a proposed fire station and sought to enforce the covenants in the Superior Court.  The Town moved to dismiss the Trustee’s complaint.  According to the Town, the restrictions were appurtenant, and, because the Trust owned no land in the Town benefiting from the covenants, the Trustee lacked standing to enforce them.  The Superior Court agreed, reasoning that any deeded covenant not expressly identified as “in gross” is, under New Hampshire’s rules of interpretation, an appurtenant covenant.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court reversed, concluding that the covenants were in gross.  In doing so, the Court noted that the touchstone in interpreting contracts, including deeds, is to ascertain the intention of the parties, and that the rules of interpretation are merely aids employed by the courts when there is little or no evidence of that intention.  It concluded that the Superior Court went astray when it gave dispositive significance to New Hampshire’s preference for appurtenant covenants over covenants in gross.  In other words, the Superior Court erroneously treated an interpretive aid as establishing a per se rule.
 
The Court observed that Lynch was not a case where evidence of the parties’ intent was entirely lacking.  To the contrary, the Court pointed out that the parties’ intent could be discerned both from the language of the deed itself and the circumstances surrounding its execution; most notably, the fact that by the time the deed was signed, the Trust owned no other land in the Town to which the covenants could possibly be appurtenant.  The Court had little trouble dispensing with the notion that the parties intended a situation where the restrictive covenants would have been unenforceable from the moment they were created.
 
With determining the parties’ intent as the ultimate goal in contract interpretation, the Court in Lynch was justifiably unwilling to give primacy to a rule of interpretation favoring appurtenant covenants over evidence that the parties actually intended to create covenants in gross.  At times it is easy to seize upon a rule of interpretation as the be-all and end-all in a case involving an ambiguous contract.  What Lynch reminds us is that the rules of interpretation are merely aids used to discern the parties’ intent – they do not trump the evidence of what the parties actually intended.