The North Dakota Supreme Court has unanimously tossed out a lawsuit by a woman seeking to claw back more than $110,000 she poured into renovating a ranch house owned by her former partner's family trust.
The ruling settles a multi-year courtroom battle over a 10-acre homestead in rural Grant County, where Mary Roth lived with rancher Gary Meyer while running a joint cattle business. Meyer had lived on the land for decades under the assumption that he owned the acreage. But legal title belonged to the Jean L. Ehrmantrout Residuary Trust, administered by Meyer's three sons as co-trustees. When the couple's relationship collapsed, Roth demanded reimbursement for the materials, fixtures, and construction costs she personally financed. She slapped the trust's beneficiaries with an unjust enrichment claim, arguing they enjoyed a massive windfall at her expense. The justices disagreed.
Writing for the five-judge bench, Justice Jon J. Jensen drew a hard line between out-of-pocket expenses and legally compensable enrichment. North Dakota law demands proof of the actual financial gain pocketed by the titleholder, not simply a tally of what the claimant paid at the hardware store. While Roth entered voluminous receipts showing she shelled out upwards of $110,000, she presented no licensed appraisers or land valuation experts to demonstrate that those purchases added a single cent to the parcel's fair market worth.
"Receipts and a compilation of purchases show what Mary Roth spent; they do not show the value those purchases added to the property," Justice Jensen wrote in the opinion. Chief Justice Lisa Fair McEvers, Justice Jerod E. Tufte, Justice Douglas A. Bahr, and Justice Mark A. Friese concurred without dissent.
Under North Dakota jurisprudence, prevailing on unjust enrichment requires satisfying five statutory elements: a defendant's enrichment, a plaintiff's impoverishment, a causal connection between the two, an absence of legal justification, and the lack of an adequate remedy at law. While the lower court acknowledged Roth suffered a genuine financial hit, judges cannot guess property appreciation out of thin air. Reaffirming the legal standard set in the 2018 precedent Tornabeni v. Wold, the state high court held that trial judges are strictly barred from substituting retail prices or speculative listing estimates for rigorous valuation evidence.
The decision, issued under docket number 20260153, marks the third and final time the long-running feud reached the state capital, following earlier appellate rounds in 2024 and 2025. By upholding the Grant County District Court's third amended judgment, the Supreme Court closed the docket permanently, leaving the property in the trust's hands and barring Roth from recovering any portion of the disputed funds.