Late last month, we reported on the case of 94-year-old grandmother Geraldine Tyler, whose Minneapolis condo was sold by Hennepin County in Minnesota for $40,000 to pay off a $15,000 tax debt: 94-year-old Grandmother Fights Home Equity Theft at the U.S. Supreme Court

The kicker was that instead of returning the $25,000 surplus over the amount Geraldine owed the state, Hennepin County decided to keep the whole amount! Even worse, the County’s retention of those funds was entirely in keeping with Minnesota state law, as we reported: //

in a unanimous opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court gave short shrift to the Eighth Circuit’s “state law controls” argument:

The Takings Clause does not itself define property…For that, the Court draws on ‘existing rules or understandings’ about property rights…State law is one important source…But state law cannot be the only source. Otherwise, a State could sidestep the Takings Clause by disavowing traditional property interests in assets it wishes to appropriate.

In other words, a state cannot just pass a state statute that lets them take your property without compensation, which is apparently what the County, and the federal district and appeals court thought. Or as the Supreme Court puts it: “The Takings Clause would be a dead letter if a state could simply exclude from its definition of property any interest that the state wished to take.” //

The Court then gives a history lesson, going all the way back to the Magna Carta, which said that “when [a] sheriff or bailiff came to collect any debts owed [the King] from a dead man, they could remove property ‘until the debt which is evident shall be fully paid to us; and the residue shall be left to the executors to fulfill the will of the deceased.” Blackstone, the leading legal authority in England in the 1700s, said, “[i]f a tax collector seized a taxpayer’s property, he was ‘bound by an implied contract in law to restore [the property] on payment of the debt, duty, and expenses, before the time of sale; or, when sold, to render back the overplus.'” //

The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.