David T. Everett v. Sarah E. Tharrett, as Successor Trustee of the Roxine Poznich Revocable Trust

I. Whether the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause is satisfied when state courts at three successive levels either ignore or refuse to rule on whether a trust can be adjudicated without the complete trust instrument in the record—the district court and Court of Appeals remaining silent on the issue, and the Kansas Supreme Court acknowledging but declining to address it—despite the universal rule of trust law recognized by every American jurisdiction including Kansas that courts must read trust instruments "in their entirety" to ascertain the settlor's intent, thereby rendering any "opportunity to be heard" inherently meaningless under Armstrong v. Manzo, 380 U.S. 545, 552 (1965), which requires that due process be “meaningful.” II. Whether the Kansas Supreme Court violated the Supremacy Clause by misinterpreting United Student Aid Funds, Inc. v. Espinosa, 559 U.S. 260, 271 (2010), to require that due process violations must "effectively eliminate personal jurisdiction" before voiding a judgment, when Espinosa established that judgments are void based on "either" jurisdictional error "or" due process violations—two independent pathways, not a single merged requirement—and the Kansas Supreme Court cited no authority or reasoning for collapsing Espinosa's two pathways into one. III. Whether the Fourteenth Amendment is violated when a state applies its acquiescence doctrine to bar appellate review of a judgment rendered without meaningful due process, by forcing a party to choose between (a) leaving his pre-existing property interest as a trust beneficiary in the hands of opposing counsel taking unauthorized attorney fees in violation of state law, or (b) accepting distribution of that property and forfeiting appellate review of a judgment entered without any evidentiary hearing, without the complete trust instrument in the record, without any factual evidence, and at a hearing noticed as a status conference rather than a final adjudication.