United States v. Huckaby: A Nevada Trust and California Land

Most of the trust decisions that get argued about turn on what the settlor did. The structure was funded after the claim was already in sight, or the settlor kept powers that let a court say he could still reach the money. United States v. Huckaby does not fit that pattern, and that is why it is worth reading closely.

A federal court held that a judgment lien reached real property held in a trust designated a Nevada spendthrift trust. It got there without finding fraud, without finding concealment, and without deciding whether the trustees were alter egos or nominees. It got there on choice of law. This page walks through what the order actually decided, the two questions the court was careful to separate, and the three arguments it never needed to reach. The case is entry 2 in our record of domestic asset protection trust failures.

What the Court Decided

On March 2, 2026, Judge Dale A. Drozd granted the United States partial summary judgment in No. 2:23-cv-00587-DAD-JDP. The order declares that the government's judgment lien encumbers Robert Huckaby's one-half ownership interest in the property, and that the government may submit a proposed order of foreclosure.

The motion was granted in part and otherwise denied. That qualifier is doing real work, and the sections below explain what fell on each side of it.

The Structure and the Sequence

Robert Huckaby and Joyce Tritsch acquired a property on Alice Lake Road in South Lake Tahoe, California, on August 29, 2005, as joint tenants.

On October 17, 2011, they executed a trust instrument creating the Circle H Bar T Trust, designated a Nevada spendthrift trust by its terms, and transferred the property into it the same day. They were the trust's settlors, its trustees, and its sole beneficiaries during their lifetimes. One family, four roles, one document.

On March 30, 2018, judgment was entered against Huckaby for failure to honor IRS levies. It went unsatisfied. By June 15, 2025 the balance stood at $87,959.84, and the government sued to enforce the judgment against the Tahoe property.

One sequencing detail belongs here rather than in a footnote, because write-ups of this case tend to leave it out. The transfer preceded the judgment by more than six years, which sounds like careful advance planning. But the government argued in reply that the property went into the trust roughly one month after Huckaby was served with the IRS levy that eventually produced the judgment. The court recorded that argument and set it aside, saying it need not address it because it rejected the defendants' position on separate grounds. So the point was never decided. It also means this is not a case about a settlor who acted well before any claim existed.

The Question the Court Asked First

Because the court's jurisdiction rested on a federal question, it applied federal common law choice-of-law rules, which in the Ninth Circuit follow the Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws.

The defendants argued that Nevada law governed because the trust said so. The court agreed with them, as far as that goes. Section 277 of the Restatement provides that an instrument creating a trust of an interest in land

is construed in accordance with the rules of construction of the state designated for this purpose in the instrument.

Then it drew the line that decides the case:

However, the issue before the court is not a matter of interpreting the Trust but instead whether the land which is held in that trust can be reached by a plaintiff creditor.

For that second question the court found section 280 persuasive:

[w]hether the interest of a beneficiary of a trust of an interest in land is assignable by him and can be reached by his creditors, is determined by the law that would be applied by the courts of the situs.

The property sat in California. California law therefore decided whether it could be reached, notwithstanding the Nevada designation the defendants had relied on.

This is the hinge of the whole decision, and it is easy to skim past. The defendants were not wrong that the trust was a Nevada trust. They were wrong about what that buys when the asset is land in another state.

Why California Law Ended It

California does not permit a settlor to be the protected beneficiary of their own spendthrift trust. Quoting the Ninth Circuit's decision in In re Moses, the court set out the rule and the reason for it:

under California law, a settlor of a spendthrift trust cannot also act as a beneficiary of that trust (i.e., California law prohibits "self-settled" trusts). California law voids self-settled trusts to prevent individuals from placing their property beyond the reach of their creditors while at the same time still reaping the bounties of such property.

Huckaby and Tritsch were trustors, settlors, trustees and beneficiaries of the same trust. That made it self-settled, and the spendthrift provisions void against their creditors.

The defendants had one argument left: that section 15304 should not apply because the property went into the trust before the government acquired its lien. The court gave it short treatment.

Defendants cite no authority in support of this proposition and the court cannot identify any provision within § 15304 that would limit its effects to land held in trust following incurrence of a lien.

The court then established that Huckaby held a property interest the lien could attach to, and held that he had two. As trustee he held legal title; as beneficiary he held an equitable interest, which under California law makes beneficiaries the real owners of trust property. Under 28 U.S.C. section 3201(a), a civil judgment creates a lien on all real property of a judgment debtor.

The Three Arguments the Court Never Reached

The government pleaded more than it needed, and the order is a study in how little was required.

Alter ego and nominee. The complaint sought a declaration that the defendants held title as alter egos or nominees of themselves individually. The court never decided it.

The timing of the transfer. The one-month gap after the levy was raised and expressly set aside.

That the transfer was inherently invalid. The government argued that a transfer to a self-settled trust is invalid as such. The court declined to consider it, noting that section 15304(a) provides that the invalidity of the restraint on transfer does not affect the validity of the trust. On that basis it also refused to declare the defendants joint tenants of the property, which is the part of the motion that was denied.

Three theories, none of them needed. The creditor won on the narrowest available ground, and the narrowest ground required proving nothing about the people involved.

What the Order Does Not Establish

A decision is worth less when it is oversold, so two limits.

It is not a fraudulent transfer case. No court found that Huckaby and Tritsch intended to hinder, delay or defraud anyone. Citing this case for the proposition that they were caught doing something wrong misstates it.

It is a district court order on partial summary judgment. It is not an appellate decision and does not bind other courts. It is included in our records for the mechanism it demonstrates, not as a headcount entry. We keep the wider set of domestic decisions on the same terms.

What a Planner Takes From It

The rule that survives this order is about assets, not jurisdictions. A trust's governing-law clause generally does not convert out-of-state real estate into property of the chosen state. Where the asset is land, the law of the place it sits tends to govern whether a creditor can reach it, and in a state that voids self-settled spendthrift provisions that may be the end of the protection.

Three practical consequences follow, and they may matter more than the choice of trust situs.

Real property is the hardest asset class in this field. Land cannot be moved, and the court where it sits has jurisdiction over it whatever the title documents say. Planning for real estate generally works through other mechanisms, which we set out in protecting real estate.

Serving as your own trustee invites the question. Here the settlors were also the trustees and the sole beneficiaries, which is what made the trust self-settled on the face of the instrument. Independent trustee involvement is one of the costs of a protective structure, and it is a cost for a reason.

A structure that depends on a statute is only as good as the forum's willingness to apply it. That is the same exposure a bankruptcy court identified in Battley v. Mortensen, where a settlor who complied with the Alaska statute lost on federal grounds. The comparison with an offshore structure is set out in Cook Islands Trust versus DAPT; the short version is that the difference is enforcement rather than statutory language.

None of that makes a domestic trust useless, and none of it makes an offshore trust a solution to U.S. real estate. An offshore asset protection trust is irrevocable, requires independent trustee involvement, carries ongoing costs, and cannot properly be used to defeat a known creditor. We decline engagements structured to defeat a known creditor.