Hongfei Liu v. Min Li

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees that no State shall deprive any person of property without due process of law, a protection that bars the imposition of substantial civil monetary judgments based upon arbitrary, speculative, or mathematically impossible evidentiary grounds. In a state marital dissolution proceeding, the trial court entered a massive community asset "waste" finding and a dependent monetary judgment against Petitioner. The record demonstrates that this financial liability was manufactured by systematically double-, triple-, and quadruple-counting single cash flows (such as counting a single separate-property transfer four distinct times as a transfer, tuition, housing, and maternal support), penalizing legally non-existent transactions that were fully reversed on the banking record, and inventing decades of fictitious collegiate housing costs. The state appellate courts acknowledged independent property errors but affirmed this specific financial penalty in full. The question presented is: Whether a state court’s judicial imposition and subsequent appellate affirmation of a substantial civil monetary judgment violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment when the underlying judgment relies upon a demonstrably distorted, speculative arithmetic methodology that multi-counts single transactions and penalizes legally non-existent expenditures.