Anna Nicole Smith's Victory in Legacy Fight

The former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith won a victory in the US supreme court yesterday in her fight to pursue a share of her late husband's fortune.

In a protracted and wildly fluctuating case, the decision addresses an arcane issue of law concerning the jurisdiction of courts involved in the case.

Ms Smith claims that her husband, the late billionaire J Howard Marshall II, promised her half of his estimated $1.6bn (£875m) estate. But his son has claimed that the $6m she received in gifts was all his father wanted to give his young wife.

The two met in 1991, when Marshall was 86 and Ms Smith was a 23-year-old dancer in a Houston bar. They married three years later. But Marshall died the following year, leading to a dispute between his son and his wife.

A series of decisions in Texas and then in a federal court in California saw Smith awarded $474m from her husband's estate. That figure was reduced to $88m before a federal appeals court threw out the claim after ruling that the federal court did not have jurisdiction. The supreme court yesterday reversed that decision and the case returns to court in California.

"She's extremely excited that we got this ruling," said Kent Richland, an attorney representing Ms Smith.

"This is another battle in a very long war," Douglas Baird, a bankruptcy expert at the University of Chicago told Associated Press.

The case went to the supreme court in February, when Ms Smith, the spokeswoman for a diet products company, dressed in black and wearing dark glasses, cried in court as the wishes of her late husband were discussed.

But the dispute has been at times vicious, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in delivering the court's ruling. There were accusations, she said, that E Pierce Marshall had "engaged in forgery, fraud, and overreaching to gain control of his father's assets", and that Ms Smith had defamed her former stepson.

Yesterday Pierce Marshall said the ruling involved a "technical issue" and does not validate Ms Smith's claims.

"I will continue to fight to clear my name in California federal court. That is a promise that [Ms Smith] and her lawyers can take to the bank," he said in a statement issued in Texas. "I will continue to fight to uphold my father's estate plan and clear my name."