Vickie Lynn Marshall

‘Brains' was the headline over the only editorial these columns have run about the woman who was known to the public as Anna Nicole Smith but to the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States as Vickie Lynn Marshall, who died yesterday at the age of 39. Our obituary is on page five. The editorial, published back in May, advanced the proposition that the octogenarian billionaire Texas oilman, J. Howard Marshall II, may well have married Vickie Lynn not for her astonishing beauty but for her intelligence. At least she appeared to be having her way with the best lawyers and jurists in the country. At the time, she had just won a ruling from the U. S. Supreme Court that was remarkable not only for being unanimous but also for opening up, at her behest, huge swatches of probate law to future questioning. Not bad, we observed, for a former Playboy bunny.

The victory Anna Nicole Smith won in the Supreme Court didn't give her the half of her late husband's estate that she said he promised her. What the Supreme Court did was credit her strategy in moving the claim out of the Texas probate courts, where she was roundly defeated. She did this by making, before the probate case was resolved completely, a bankruptcy filing in California in the face of a sexual harassment judgment that was handed down against her in a claim brought by a personal assistant. She told the bankruptcy court that one of the reasons she couldn't pay her bills was that her late husband's son had denied her the inheritance she expected and had done so by blocking her access to her husband during his waning days, an action that, if it happened, would satisfy the legal definition of a tort. So, we noted, she managed to convert a probate case into both a bankruptcy and a tort, which enabled her to secure from the bankruptcy court a ruling against Marshall's son that would have guaranteed her a portion of the inheritance she sought, even if she didn't get it via probate.

Vickie Lynn Marshall still had a long way to go before getting her hands on the $500 million or so she insisted she'd been promised. There are those who reckon the Supreme Court, dazzled by Vickie Lynn Marshall's mind, failed to appreciate how far they had skated, in an opinion written by Justice Ginsburg, onto thin ice, with the danger of plunging the federal judiciary into an area of the law, probate, it'd long avoided. One can't know how it would have turned out had she lived to follow the case through. It's unclear whether the case will now end or be carried on by her own estate. But we do know it was a remarkable legal drama, one that had, somehow, a character that reflects one of the wonderful things about America, where many of our great Supreme Court cases have been brought by modest persons, some of whom were criminals, some righteous, some just stubborn, and some just smarter than the other side reckoned.