NM Supreme Court abolishes lawsuits targeting third parties for damaging, breaking up marriages

SANTA FE — New Mexico's highest court issued an opinion on Monday affirming its 2025 ruling barring lawsuits brought by individuals seeking damages from third parties accused of breaking up a marriage, a common law practice already outlawed in most states.

In the unanimous opinion, all five New Mexico Supreme Court justices agreed with the court's decision last August to dismiss a Colorado man's civil claim against a New Mexico resident, whom he accused of initiating an extramarital affair with his wife in Colorado and breaking up the couple's marriage.

The Supreme Court opinion effectively abolished the "tort of alienation of affections" in New Mexico, overturning a precedent justices set in the 1923 case, Birchfield v. Birchfield, in which a woman sued her father-in-law for intentionally causing the breakup of her marriage to his son.  

In the more than century-old case, justices at the time ruled that the loss of a marital relationship due to intervention by a third party was a civil wrongdoing actionable under state law, which today's court ruled didn't comport with legal and social changes that have taken place since.

"The core of alienation of affections claims and the proof they demand are irreconcilable with the legal developments that followed our holding in Birchfield," Chief Justice David K. Thomson wrote in the opinion. "And beneath the legal progress of the last one hundred years is a sweeping undercurrent of social change that robs the tort of any lingering justification in the law."

In his lawsuit, the Colorado man alleged that a Taos County man had initiated the affair with his wife after meeting her at a party in Colorado, leading the plaintiff to file suit under the state's "alienation of affections" law, which is in effect in only a handful of states, according to legal websites. The couple subsequently divorced.

Taos County 8th Judicial District Court Judge Jeffrey Shannon allowed the lawsuit to move forward but certified a request for appeal by the Colorado man's wife, who filed a motion to intervene for judgement after citing "burdensome and invasive discovery requests" and questioned which state's laws were germane to the case. Colorado has both abolished and criminalized pursuit of alienation of affections lawsuits.

Justices took up the case after the New Mexico Court of Appeals asked the high court to determine whether legal claims for alienation of affections remained valid or should be abolished in the state.

The justices heard oral arguments in the case last year at San Juan College in Farmington as part of the Court's Rule of Law Program, in which students observe an appellate proceeding to learn about the state's legal system, according to a press release from the Administrative Office of the Courts.

"Indeed, the inherently dehumanizing nature of the tort is reflected in the fact that, regardless of gender, it treats affections as property and presumes that a spouse has no agency regarding to whom they give their affections," Chief Justice Thomson wrote in the opinion. "Instead, the tort purports to take interlopers to task for effectively stealing the affections of the spouse just as one might steal an inanimate object."

John Miller is the Albuquerque Journal’s northern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at jmiller@abqjournal.com.