07/10/2026
The Supreme Court just weighed in on Pung v. Isabella County. You may remember that in a recent post I pointed out that Clarence Thomas suggested that delinquent tax payers should be paid inflated prices when their property sold at auction for back taxes, and I disagreed. My position was and is, if the sale was fair, the owner gets what came from the sale-just like the Alabama tax lien certificate foreclosure system allows. In this vein, the Supes are sending the case back to the 6th Circuit to dig deeper into what counts as a “fairly conducted” tax sale. The core takeaway: when a county seizes and sells property for unpaid taxes, the owner is entitled to the surplus from that sale — nothing more, nothing less.
This matters for anyone dealing with tax foreclosures, surplus claims, or questions about what “just compensation” really means. The Court didn’t settle the fairness issue, but they made clear that the process itself could be constitutionally significant. You may disagree for various reasons, but what matters is that Alabama is squarely inside the Constitutional boundaries for tax sales. https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/justices-send-compensation-dispute-over-seized-home-back-to-lower-court/?fbclid=IwY2xjawS90U5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETF0cEE4cTRFbTUxVjhJNXBCc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHolzFumUsAvQkRvQqlyCnioUdUHmnvW4m2vWHhdWCkecxaxfmlu_S4hnTSrx_aem_h1uPmnkmxx6_mREkwVsILQ
(Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)The Supreme Court on Tuesday sent a dispute over the compensation that a Michigan county was required to pay to a homeowner after it sold his house because of unpaid taxes back to the lower court. In an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the court agreed in Pung v. Isab...
