Lex Fori PLLC and Carson J. Tucker File Brief Challenging Michigan’s Property Foreclosure Tax System and Constitutionality of Property Acquisition

Lex Fori, PLLC and Carson J. Tucker recently filed a brief in the Court of Appeals seeking to overturn a property tax foreclosure in which a contracted third-party was sending notices of the tax foreclosure proceedings to a post office box which was no longer in operation. The contractor had access to the property owner’s proper home address, as did the County Treasurer, yet, the only “notice” that was sent to our client regarding the tax foreclosure proceedings was the judgment, by which time it was too late to redeem the property.

Interesting sub-issues in this case have to do with challenging the constitutionality of taking private property for a failure of the property owner to pay a single year’s property tax bill of a couple thousand dollars, and yet allowing the county to resell the property taken on the open market for a windfall – taking the value of the property without compensation or any reimbursement to the property owner. In this case, several parcels and lake front property were taken this way and sold where the client had maintained this property for decades making the coefficient between the tax bill and the value of the property extremely high.

Read the brief here: Mitchell.Brief.on.Appeal.01.17.2020

Law Offices of Carson J. Tucker and Lex Fori, PLLC File Michigan Appeals Briefs Under Administrative Order 2019-6

We have been preparing, formatting and filing our briefs in the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court under Administrative Order 2019-6, which allows us to use all the readability and formatting tools of Adobe to create fully interactive and e-friendly briefs. As a former Supreme Court law clerk and an insurance coverage counsel, Mr. Tucker understands the convenience of having a fully interactive document with all file contents and citations referenced and linked for quick review.

The ideal briefs and appendices (which we strive to create) will contain fully interactive table of contents and bookmarks, links to cases, links to the direct location (page and line) in the Appendix and/or accompanying attachments and indices and tables of contents that are fully interactive – meaning the reader can toggle back and forth to the references and have immediate confirmation and documentary support for our arguments and factual assertions, respectively. We can also use a larger, eye-friendly font, which is critical for those who must read brief after brief, day in and day out!

Here’s one we filed in the Court of Appeals last month (January 2020) in a constitutional and property law case in the Michigan Court of Appeals. Mitchell.Brief.on.Appeal.01.17.2020