The section
If any provision of this code or its application to any person or circumstances is held invalid, the invalidity does not affect other provisions or applications of this code that can be given effect without the invalid provision or application, and to this end the provisions of this code are severable.
Section 736.1302, Florida Statutes. Enacted in 2006 and never amended.
This is standard legislative drafting and it appears in some form in a great many Florida statutes. We are annotating it because it completes Part XIII and because a reader who finds the section number should be able to establish quickly that it does not bear on their problem.
The two limbs, which is the only interesting thing about it
The clause is written to cover two different kinds of failure.
A provision may be held invalid outright. In that case the rest of the Code continues, so long as the remainder can be given effect without it.
An application may be held invalid while the provision itself stands. A section might operate perfectly well in most circumstances and unconstitutionally in a narrow class of cases. The clause allows the section to survive as to everyone else.
That second limb does real work in principle. Constitutional challenges to trust legislation are more often about how a provision operates in a particular situation, such as retroactive application to an instrument signed long before, than about whether the provision could ever be valid.
The test in both limbs is the same and it is practical rather than intentional. The question is what can be given effect without the invalid part. The clause does not ask what the Legislature would have wanted; it asks what still works.
Being honest about what this is worth
No provision of the Florida Trust Code has been held invalid so far as our review found, and no decision has cited this section. Its practical significance today is nil, and it would be misleading to write about it as though a reader might need it.
Where it would matter is a genuine constitutional challenge, and the likeliest candidates are visible in the Code. Several sections apply retroactively by their own terms. Section 736.1109 reaches decedents who died before its enactment, and section 736.1303(1)(d) applies rules of construction to instruments executed before the Code existed. Retroactive application is the sort of thing that gets challenged, and it is exactly the sort of challenge the second limb of this clause anticipates.
What Part XIII actually contains
This Part has three sections and they have nothing to do with one another beyond being the leftovers.
Section 736.1301 is a reverse preemption switch aimed at the federal Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act. This section is severability. Section 736.1303 is the application provision, and it is the one that matters, because it establishes that the Code applies to trusts created before it existed and supplies the July 1, 2007 date that runs through the whole chapter.
If you arrived here looking for something operative, section 736.1303 is almost certainly the section you want.
No Florida court has cited this section
A search returns no citing documents at any precedential status in any court we searched. Because every section in this batch returned zero, we verified the search itself before publishing the result, by running the same query against sections known to have case law and confirming that they returned hits.
For a severability clause, no citations means no successful challenges, which is the outcome the Legislature would have hoped for when it wrote the clause.