Argument preview: Justices consider contracts clause and post-divorce life-insurance policies

The story of Mark Sveen and Kaye Melin is (at least according to Mark’s children, Ashley and Antone) a familiar one. After the couple married in 1997, Mark named Kaye as the primary beneficiary of his life-insurance policy. A decade later, they divorced, but Mark never changed the designation on his insurance. This meant that when he died in 2011, Kaye was still his beneficiary – much to the chagrin of the children, adults by that time, who claimed that they should get the money. A federal trial court in Minnesota agreed with the children, relying on a 2002 state law that provides that a divorce automatically nullifies the designation of a former spouse as the beneficiary of a life-insurance policy.