Caseflicks

Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit • 2012

Milton H. Greene Archives, Inc. v. Marilyn Monroe LLC

692 F.3d 983

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, an estate’s successor cannot claim a lucrative right by reversing a domicile position the estate successfully maintained for decades.

Background

Marilyn Monroe died in California in 1962, but her will was probated in New York. For decades, the estate’s executors represented to courts and tax authorities that she had remained domiciled in New York. Those representations helped the estate avoid substantial California inheritance taxes and defeat a claim by a purported heir.

Marilyn Monroe LLC, which received the estate’s remaining assets, later claimed that it had inherited Monroe’s posthumous right of publicity and sued photographers over commercial uses of her image. The district court initially granted summary judgment to the photographers. After California amended its law to make a posthumous right of publicity retroactively descendible through a will’s residuary clause, the court reconsidered but again granted summary judgment to the photographers. It held that Monroe LLC was judicially estopped from claiming Monroe had been domiciled in California.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Monroe LLC could claim that Monroe died domiciled in California after the estate’s executors had repeatedly asserted her New York domicile in earlier proceedings.

Holding

No. Monroe LLC was judicially estopped from asserting California domicile and therefore could not enforce a posthumous right of publicity.

Reasoning

Judicial estoppel protects the integrity of judicial proceedings when a party seeks to benefit from clearly inconsistent positions. Courts consider whether the earlier position was accepted and whether the change would confer an unfair advantage. A knowing misrepresentation may support estoppel, but it is not an inflexible prerequisite.

The positions were plainly inconsistent: Monroe could have only one domicile at death. The executors had asserted New York domicile while representing the estate, whose beneficiaries’ interests they served. Monroe LLC, as successor to those interests, was sufficiently aligned with the estate for their representations to be attributed to it.

Courts and quasi-judicial authorities accepted the earlier position. California probate proceedings treated Monroe as a New York domiciliary, and courts applied New York law in proceedings concerning a purported heir. The estate thus obtained concrete benefits from its longstanding position.

Allowing Monroe LLC to switch to California domicile would give it a second, substantial advantage: access to California’s retroactively descendible right of publicity. The change would also suggest that either the earlier tribunals or the court in this case had been misled—the kind of result judicial estoppel is meant to prevent.

With Monroe LLC barred from asserting California domicile, New York law controlled whether the claimed right passed through Monroe’s will. New York recognized no descendible posthumous right of publicity, so the estate could not have transferred one to Monroe LLC. Its Indiana-law claim also failed because the applicable choice-of-law rule pointed to New York law.