Background
Curtis Williams and Larmetrice Nunnally-Williams divorced in 2017. The divorce decree awarded Nunnally-Williams $8,470.57 from retirement benefits associated with Williams’s U.S. Army employment. A 2023 retirement-benefits order recognized her right to that amount, including earnings and losses, from Williams’s Uniformed Services Thrift Savings Plan account.
The plan later informed Nunnally-Williams that, although she was entitled to $9,459.26, only $512.87 had been transferred to her. She sued Williams in 2024, alleging that he had withdrawn the remaining $8,946.39, held those funds in constructive trust for her, and breached a fiduciary obligation by failing to deliver them. Williams filed a plea to the jurisdiction asserting the two-year limitations period in Texas Family Code section 9.003(a), but he did not plead limitations as an affirmative defense in his answer.
After the trial court denied the plea, the parties agreed to a judgment awarding Nunnally-Williams $8,946.39 plus $446.71 in interest, for a total of $9,393.10, while allowing Williams to appeal the denial of his jurisdictional plea.
The Court’s Holding
The Fourth Court of Appeals held that section 9.003 is a statute of limitations, not a jurisdictional restriction. Because the statute contains no clear language conditioning the trial court’s authority on compliance with the limitations period, the trial court retained subject-matter jurisdiction regardless of when Nunnally-Williams filed suit. The appellate court therefore treated Williams’s mislabeled plea to the jurisdiction as a motion for summary judgment.
The court held that denial of such a summary-judgment motion generally is not reviewable after trial and does not preserve the asserted defense for appeal. Williams consequently failed to preserve his limitations argument. The court further explained that, even if the issue had been preserved, Williams did not conclusively establish that section 9.003(a) applied because he failed to show that the suit concerned tangible personal property existing when the divorce decree was signed or that the provision governed Nunnally-Williams’s breach-of-fiduciary-duty claim.
The court overruled Williams’s sole appellate issue and affirmed the $9,393.10 judgment.
Key Takeaways
- Texas Family Code section 9.003 establishes a limitations defense rather than a jurisdictional bar.
- A party ordinarily must raise a limitations defense through summary judgment or prove it at trial; denial of a pretrial summary-judgment motion does not preserve the issue for appeal.
- A defendant invoking section 9.003(a) must conclusively establish that the claim seeks enforcement of a division of tangible personal property existing when the divorce decree was signed.
Why It Matters
The decision distinguishes a court’s power to hear a post-divorce enforcement action from a defendant’s affirmative limitations defense. Labeling limitations as a jurisdictional objection does not avoid the ordinary requirements for pleading, proving, and preserving that defense.
For family-law practitioners, the opinion also underscores that section 9.003(a) does not automatically govern every action brought more than two years after a divorce decree. Its applicability depends on the property and claims at issue, and the party asserting limitations bears the burden of establishing those facts.