The decline of union membership and public support for labor unions has corresponded rather precisely to the rise in the percentage of Americans who hold occupational licenses.
Occupational licensing would not have grown without broad support. Here’s an economist’s explanation of why:
Governmental officials benefit from Read the rest of this entry
After ten years at 301 West Pacific in Branson, Styron & Shilling has relocated its Branson office to a lovely old building at 302 East Church Street, in Ozark, Missouri, a half block east of the northeast corner of the Christian County courthouse square.
With this move, Styron & Shilling’s Branson and Ozark offices are consolidated to a new location that fits the nature of our firm’s evolving Read the rest of this entry
It’s great to be hard to find, but sometimes it causes you to lose stuff.
In the case of United Asset Management v. Clark, United lost its real estate in Cass County, Missouri, having failed to pay its taxes. If United hadn’t played hard to find, there’s a good chance that it would have received the notices from the county collector and from Clark, who bought the property at the collector’s sale.
This 40-page opinion of the Western District of the Missouri Court of Appeals adds detail to Missouri’s rapidly growing body of law that interprets the Jones-Munger Act, which is the collection of Missouri statutes that set out the procedure for collection of property taxes by counties through the advertisement and sale of delinquent real estate.
The Jones-Munger Act provides a period for a property owner to redeem property after somebody else has paid the taxes. The United States Constitution’s protection of property owners from confiscation without due process requires strict adherence to statutory procedures to assure that nobody loses their property without notice.
According to this opinion (and the precedents that it cites), when a county collector receives a tax statement that is stamped with “return to sender, undeliverable at this address, unable to forward,” the collector may be required to do more, rather than merely include the property in the collector’s sales, held in Missouri counties on the fourth Monday of each August.
Similarly, when the purchaser of a property at a tax sale applies for a collector’s deed, the purchaser must make a diligent effort to give notice to the property owner and any lienholders (such as those holding a mortgage on the property) that their redemption rights will expire.
Just what is required of the county collector and the tax sale purchaser depends on the circumstances, especially since the Jones v. Flowers decision of 2006, one of the first United Supreme Court opinions written by Chief Justice John Roberts. But Roberts wrote that the return of the envelope triggers a process that must be appropriate under the circumstances. For a tax collector or a purchaser of a tax certificate, it’s usually a good idea to:
I’ve been able to persuade courts to set aside collector’s deeds when the purchaser at tax sale couldn’t demonstrate diligence.
But United Asset Management Trust Company was too hard to find, which might be desirable for one wanting to avoid paying taxes and other debts. But United paid a price for being elusive.
United was the trustee for Coast to Coast Holding Company, which had no address in the United States, but was domiciled in Grand Turk, Caicos, British West Indies. Somewhere along the line, its Missouri post office box was cancelled, with no forwarding address. United Trust’s manager was in another state. The Cass County Collector was diligent, but couldn’t locate United, Neither could Clark, who bought the property at the collector’s tax sale. There was no building on the property and nowhere to post a notice.
The appellate court agreed with the trial court. The county collector and the purchaser at the tax sale did all that was reasonable and practical under the circumstances created by United. So United lost its real property for a few dollars in taxes.
If a court told me that I had to kill my dog for killing a deer, I’d be upset. But it could happen.
When a dog kills or maims a “domestic animal” in Missouri, the statutory penalties (section 273.020 RSMo) are harsh. The owner or keeper of the bad dog is liable for the full amount of monetary damages and is obligated to kill the bad dog. But can whitetail deer be considered domestic animals?
Three dogs, alleged to have been owned by Lange, broke into Oak Creek’s pen and killed 21 bucks, does and fawns, all hand-raised and kept for the ultimate purpose of creating bucks with massive racks. When Oak Creek sued Lange, Lange asked the court to rule, in a motion for summary judgment, that the words “sheep and other domestic animals” in section 273.020 applied to livestock typically raised on farms, such as cattle, swine, chickens and horses.
The Missouri court of appeals in Oak Creek Whitetail Ranch v. Lange disagreed with the Osage County trial judge, looking to a dictionary definition, which included the phrase “which have been domesticated by man so as to live and breed in a tame condition.” The court of appeals noted that the slain deer had never been in the wild, but “were all penned and hand-fed, raised in an environment that did not allow them to move freely beyond their confined area.” The court’s logic is apparently that whether an animal (other than a sheep) is domestic is determined by the individual animal’s status, not the species. Oak Creek’s deer were apparently defenseless in their confinement, unable to flee and perhaps unable to survive in the wild. Cats, dogs and hogs often become feral, regardless of their previous condition of confinement.
The offspring of breeding stock, such as those killed in Oak Creek’s pen, are apparently not domestic animals when placed on game ranches to be killed by trophy-seeking hunters, who pay handsomely for the privilege of slaughtering them. You can see an example of the ideal rack on the Farming for Wildlife website.
Johnny Ray Chadd was the city administrator for Lake Ozark. City administrators in Missouri are always a vote or two away from getting fired, and Chadd was on the brink. On a vote to fire him in 2005, after he had served less than one year, the aldermen were deadlocked and the mayor cast the tie-breaking vote to let him go.
Chadd sued, claiming that the applicable Missouri statute and the city ordinance required the vote of a majority of the aldermen to remove him as a city officer. The mayor’s vote was irrelevant. In 2007, the appellate court ordered that Chadd be reinstated. He was rehired and immediately fired by the unanimous vote of the aldermen.
Chadd sued again, seeking back wages for the period between his first firing and the second, also alleging that he was wrongfully terminated. Apparently because Missouri law characterizes the employment relationship as at the will of the employer, Chadd alleged that his termination fell under the vague term “prima facie tort,” a legal theory that has never gotten any traction in Missouri courts.
The trial court threw out Chadd’s suit on Lake Ozark’s motion for summary judgment.
Chadd didn’t sue for back wages in the first suit, so he was barred from bringing up the issue now under the principle of res judicata. This principle means that courts will not consider claims that either were or could have been raised in a previous suit between the same parties. The trial court indicated that Chadd had been obligated make his claim for back wages in his first suit, where he was successful.
The prima facie tort claim also failed. Missouri’s at-will employment doctrine applies to situations where there is no employment contract for a specific term. A worker cannot win a suit for damages resulting from termination unless the termination violates some other statute, such as a statute protecting whistle-blowers or persons who are fired for filing workers’ compensation or racial discrimination claims, for example. Calling a wrongful termination claim a prima facie tort doesn’t get around the at-will employment doctrine.
The Court of Appeals upheld the summary judgment in this opinion, Chadd v. Lake Ozark.
No house is big enough for two couples, my mother told me long ago. Especially when one couple pays for nearly everything.
When the non-paying couple asked the court to divide the house, a Missouri court left them out in the cold. They appealed, and the court’s decision in Hoit v. Rankin indicates Read the rest of this entry
Within a week, the heat wave will have run its course and we’ll surely have a little rain. Then we can get moving again in the wonderful Ozarks outdoors and watch the greens become gold, orange and red.
Here are some links for outdoor activities Read the rest of this entry
What do lawyers do? In other words, what is the scope of the lawyer racket?
A suit filed in December 2009 in Cole County Circuit Court in December 2009 may give us some idea of whether LegalZoom’s document-generation service overlaps the practice of law in Missouri. LegalZoom has filed a motion to move the suit into federal court.
LegalZoom.com., Inc. takes information from its customers and uses that information to complete documents, which it sells to those customers. In some ways, it’s a web-based version of the books of forms that have been available in paper form for hundreds of years and in digital form for 30 years or more.
The lawsuit was filed by persons who used LegalZoom for the preparation of a will and organizational documents for a limited liability company. The plaintiffs asked the court to certify that they were representatives of all Missouri residents who have done business with LegalZoom. The plaintiffs and their lawyers want Read the rest of this entry
As with any identifiable region, the Ozarks’ economy is a partly a product of adjacent economies interacting with internal and external forces. A survey of the metro areas that ring the Ozarks may give us a hint about what to expect for the future. The economic engines within the Ozarks also deserve a look. This long essay will yield the conclusion that 2009 will be a year of Read the rest of this entry
