We were counsel for Olympic View Water and Sewer District in Ronald Wastewater District v. Olympic View Water & Sewer District. Benjamin Gould’s article in NWSidebar suggesting the Supreme Court’s reasoning in that case departed from past decisions of the court on subject-matter jurisdiction, fails to acknowledge supportive Supreme Court precedent.
Washington law has long understood that the analysis of a judgment’s validity is not confined merely to analyzing personal and subject-matter jurisdiction. John Hancock Mut. Life Ins. Co. v. Gooley, 196 Wash. 357, 370, 83 P.2d 221 (1938) (recognizing that there are three jurisdictional elements to any valid judgment—“jurisdiction of the subject matter, jurisdiction of the person, and the power or authority to render the particular judgment.”); Dike v. Dike, 75 Wn.2d 1, 7, 448 P.2d 490 (1968). The court’s decision is grounded in Washington law of more than eight decades duration. The court’s John Hancock decision itself was based on treatise authority.
Without mentioning these cases, the court’s Ronald Wastewater opinion was foreshadowed in Banowsky v. Backstrom, 193 Wn.2d 724, 445 P.3d 543 (2019) when it ruled that a district court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction in a civil case where damages exceeded the statutory limit of $100,000. Obviously, a district court had subject-matter jurisdiction to adjudicate the type of case generally, civil cases; it lacked the requisite authority to adjudicate cases exceeding the statutory limit.
The court applied a sensible rule on the validity of a judgment. A court may have personal jurisdiction over the parties and subject-matter jurisdiction to adjudicate certain types of claims in general terms, but it may still lack express authority from the Legislature or common law to render the judgment in question.
Phil Talmadge. Phil is a graduate of West Seattle High School as a National Merit scholar. He has a B.A. (magna cum laude) from Yale and a J.D. from the University of Washington where he was on the Law Review. Phil served in the Washington State Senate from 1979 to 1995, served on the Washington Supreme Court from 1995 to 2001, and has taught appellate advocacy at the Seattle University and University of Washington Law Schools. He is the author of a number of articles on legal issues, has been a Superlawyer since 2001, is a fellow of the national American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, and a member of the Washington Appellate Lawyers Association.
Thomas M. Fitzpatrick Thomas is a graduate of the University of Montana and the University of Chicago Law School. He was a former partner and managing partner in the firm of Karr, Tuttle, Campbell and Stafford Frey Cooper. He served as assistant chief of the Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, Civil Division, and executive director of Snohomish County. In 2006, he returned to private practice, joining Phil Talmadge with whom he previously practiced. Fitzpatrick has served on the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association and the ABA House of Delegates, the committee which wrote the Model Rules of Judicial Discipline, and the Joint Commission which rewrote the Model Code of Judicial Conduct. He was a Washington Supreme Court representative on the Washington State Task Force Evaluating the Washington CJC, and an adjunct professor at Seattle University School of Law teaching professional responsibility.
