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Thursday, April 27, 2006
Law - More on U.S. Supreme Court rules that homeowners need better notice before losing homes for back taxes
Updating yesterday's ILB entry re the Supreme Court's ruling in Jones v. Flowers, Linda Greenshouse writes today in the NY Times:
"An elementary and fundamental requirement of due process," the Supreme Court ruled many years ago, is that the government must provide "notice" and an opportunity to be heard before it seizes property.On Wednesday, the court added teeth to that requirement, ruling that Arkansas violated a homeowner's right to due process when it sold his house for nonpayment of taxes after sending him two certified letters that came back "unclaimed."
Writing for a 5-to-3 majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that "it is not too much to insist that the state do a bit more" before using its "extraordinary power" to take and sell a person's house.
The Constitution does not require "actual notice" like personally handing the letter to the homeowner, the chief justice observed. But he said that once the state became aware, as in this case, that an effort at notice had failed, it must take "additional reasonable steps to attempt to provide notice to the property owner before selling his property, if it is practicable to do so." * * *
For anyone watching the emergence of the Roberts court, the case provided intriguing tea leaves. It was the chief justice's fourth majority opinion, and the first to provoke any dissenting votes. That the dissenters included the court's two best-known conservatives was interesting, of course.
Equally intriguing was the choice by Justice Kennedy, seen by many as the justice most likely to assume the central position on the court previously held by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, to join Justices Thomas and Scalia in an almost paradigmatic case pitting an individual against the state.
While this was hardly the most high-profile case on the court's docket, no case that requires the justices to express their views on the meaning of constitutional due process is insignificant.
Further, the federal government raised the stakes by entering the case to argue that the notice Arkansas provided to Mr. Jones was adequate. Given that many federal agencies have authority to seize property, "the United States has a substantial interest in the question presented," the solicitor general's office told the court in a 29-page brief.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 27, 2006 08:58 AM
Posted to General Law Related