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Supreme Court Hears Grandmother’s Property Rights Dispute. Compared to other legal disciplines, real estate law is mostly state law, not federal law. So when the U.S. Supreme Court hears a case it is rare and really big news. Which is why I mention the Supreme Court heard its last scheduled argument of the term last week. The case was brought by a 94-year-old widowed grandmother in Minneapolis whose condominium was seized for failure to pay property taxes. Geraldine Tyler bought her condo in 1999 and lived there until 2010 when, at age 81, she moved to a senior living center at the urging of her children. It is undisputed that she failed to pay property taxes on the condo for five years, despite being repeatedly notified that she risked losing it if she didn't pay up. By 2015, she owed $15,000 in unpaid taxes, interest and fees. Finally, Hennepin County, after offering her a tax payment plan for seniors and other options, seized the condo and sold it at public auction for $40,000 ($25,000 surplus). After the sale, the County kept the surplus funds and did not give the money to Tyler. Tyler sued. At the Supreme Court hearing on Wednesday, Tyler's lawyer argued that the county unconstitutionally took the property by keeping the $25,000 surplus over the amount owed in back taxes. Lawyer Christina Martin said that amounts to a taking without just compensation, something the U.S. Constitution explicitly forbids. The case is important because Minnesota is one of 20 states that handle the sale of such defaulted properties without sharing the surplus proceeds with the previous owner when the property is sold. The Court reserved its increasingly overt hostility for lawyer Neal Katyal, representing Minneapolis' Hennepin County. Katyal spent a good deal of time trying to persuade the court that Tyler had no legal standing to sue because, at the time her condo was auctioned, she had no equity in the house. Under state law, the seizure automatically cancelled her debts on it (debts totaling $59,000 in mortgage payments and unpaid condo fees). But Katyal got nowhere and only seemed to irritate the court, even when he referred to states that had laws like Minnesota's at the time of the founding. But justices, both conservative and liberal, didn't seem to be buying his argument. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that while 19 states may have laws like Minnesota's, the majority do not. "Most states allow for some sort of surplus or have some sort of mechanism to give the money back to homeowners," Jackson said. A decision is expected by the end of the current Supreme Court term this summer.
Bear Refuses to Drink Diet Soda. Last week a Canadian woman woke up to find a furry intruder drinking dozens of cans of her soda. Sharon Rosel told the Canadian Broadcasting Company that the bear broke the glass of her truck and got inside. She then watched for an hour and a half as it used its teeth to break open the cans. The bear first drank the orange soda, then the cola, and finally, root beer, CBC reports. From her balcony in British Columbia, Rosel watched as a black bear guzzled down 69 cans of soda, only stopping at the final three cans which were diet. "He was drinking massive amounts of soda," said Rosel. But when the bear finally had no alternative but to drink the three diet sodas, the bear refused. No diet soda for this bear. Was it the taste? The color? The smell? The viscosity? Perhaps the bear knows something about diet soda we don’t? Perhaps we’ll never know. Rosel owns the food truck and told the CBC she normally encounters bears in her remote area. Despite being diligent in never leaving food in the truck overnight, she never imagined a bear would develop a sweet tooth for soda. "I've been around bears since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, but I have never seen them go after pop," Rosel told CBC. Rosel's efforts to reason with the bear to leave her truck were futile. The bear's soda rush caused soda to be spilled all over the interior and into the gearshift. The bear also ripped the car's leather interior and broke the window roller handle from standing on it. But the diet soda remained untouched.
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