Nevada family-law case summaries

This is a family-law appeal arising from a divorce. In April 2017, Lingying He and Zuyu Su divorced under a decree that adopted the terms of their joint divorce petition. The decree gave each of them an equal share in their home (and its associated debt) and required Zuyu to pay Lingying $1,700 per month in alimony (spousal support) from May 2017 through April 2027. Zuyu stopped making alimony payments for several years. Lingying went to court to enforce the decree, and Zuyu asked the court to reduce his alimony. In April 2021, the court found Zuyu owed $98,600 in back alimony and lowered his ongoing payment to $300 per month. Zuyu then asked the court to adjust the amount he owed. During a later hearing, Lingying admitted that she had remarried in July 2017. Because of that, the court set aside its earlier April 2021 order, finding that Lingying had committed "fraud upon the court" in obtaining it. Under a Nevada statute, NRS 125.150(6), when a spouse who receives periodic alimony remarries, the required payments generally stop unless the court ordered otherwise. So the court decided Zuyu's alimony obligation actually ended in July 2017 when Lingying remarried, meaning he only owed $3,400 for payments he missed before she remarried - not $98,600. The court also addressed the house. It said the house should be listed for sale if Zuyu could not buy out Lingying's share within a set time, and it said Lingying's equity should be figured using the home's value back in April 2017, when the divorce decree was entered. On appeal, the Court of Appeals reached two results. First, it upheld the decision to cancel the April 2021 order and to recalculate the arrears. Lingying argued that because the parties had a valid agreement calling for alimony over a fixed term, the payments could not be cut off by the remarriage statute. The court agreed the agreement was valid but said that did not stop the statute from applying, because nothing in the agreement said the alimony was non-modifiable or would survive a remarriage, and because the agreement had "merged" into the divorce decree - meaning the parties' rights rested on the decree, which can be modified. Lingying also relied on an older Nevada case, Barbash, but the court noted that case applied California law and that Lingying had not raised her key arguments (that this was an "integrated agreement" or that an evidentiary hearing was needed) in the lower court, so those points were not preserved for appeal. Second, the court sided with Lingying on the house. She argued her share of equity should be based on the home's current value, not its 2017 value. Because Zuyu did not respond to this argument on appeal at all, the court treated the point as waived by him. The Court of Appeals reversed that part of the order and sent the case back so the district court could calculate each party's equal share based on the home's current fair market value, accounting for the outstanding mortgage and any post-divorce mortgage payments the parties made.