FORMER PLAYBOY MODEL Anna Nicole Smith has lost her long-running legal bid to win $88m from the inheritance of her late billionaire husband – four years after passing away herself.

The US Supreme Court ruled by 5 votes to 4 – along party lines – that the $1.6bn estate of Texan oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall could remain with Marshall’s own family.

The decision meant that a Texan court – which had previously ruled in favour of the Marshall family – ultimately held greater jurisdiction over the matter than a Californian bankruptcy court which had earlier sided with Smith.

Unusually, both parties to the case died before the courts could resolve the marathon legal dispute – the other party to the case, Marshall’s son Pierce, passed away in 2006.

Indeed, one of Smith’s two heirs has also passed away since the case began; if she had won, the money would have been inherited by her surviving five-year-old daughter Dannielynn.

Writing the court’s majority decision, chief justice John Roberts opened his judgment with a paragraph from Charles Dickens’ ‘Bleak House’ – referring to a case where many of the parties to a legal dispute died before the case was resolved.

Smith had been accused of gold-digging in the immediate aftermath of her marriage to the octogenarian Marshall, who died of natural causes aged 90 – less than a year after marrying the 27-year-old model.

Smith claimed that she had been promised a $300m inheritance, but was not mentioned in her late husband’s will. Smith died of a drug overdose in 2007, five months after the death of her son Daniel.