Quiet Title Action. Is this normal? I am in the process of purchasing a home for the first time. The title has a cloud because the house was sold at a tax sale in 2018 (the owner was deceased). The guy who bought it sold it to another person, who remodeled it and is now selling it to me. The title search company is escrowing money from the seller to clear the title via a Quiet Title action. They want to continue with closing on schedule, and said there will be an exception on my title insurance which will be removed after the title action is completed. It all sounds like standard procedure to me, but I'm not a lawyer. The one thing that concerns me is, what if the title action were to fail? Can this happen? So, for example, what if an heir of that deceased decides they want to fight me over the house? Could I lose it? What about the mortgage I took out to buy the house? Or am I getting overly concerned about nothing? Is this standard procedure? I am in Pennsylvania.
It is unusual, but not unheard of, to do a quiet title action in connection with an arms length, non-related party sale of real estate. The far more customary practice is for the seller to do the quiet title action (at the seller's expense) if it is necessary for the seller to have what is called &quot;marketable title&quot; to the property, before it is even listed for sale. It would also be more customary for the closing to be extended to a date after which the quiet title action can be completed, and for you to lease rather than buy the property prior to closing. This way, if the quiet title action fails to quiet title to the seller, the closing with you doesn't have to be undone, and you can just move your stuff out with reasonable notice from the landlord-seller, and you can look for somewhere else to live or can try to cut a deal with whoever is determined to be the true owner of the property. Also, as a practical reality, it would be quite unusual for a mortgage lender to agree to provide you with a mortgage without title insurance in place. I very much doubt that the deal can go forward as planned, even if the you and the seller agree, if you need mortgage financing to buy the house. This said, there is nothing particularly unusual about a title insurance company's requirement that a quiet title action be completed in a case where the current owner took title via a tax sale from a deceased owner's probate estate. Any irregularity in the tax sale process could vest the property back into the estate of the deceased owner, the tax sale buyer likely paid less than fair market value, and there are probably special notice requirements involved in a tax sale from a deceased owner's estate that don't apply (and extend the statute of limitations for contests of the tax sale) that wouldn't apply in the case of a tax sale from someone who is alive. Some of the potential irregularities wouldn't appear in the public record or in any other documentation that you could demand (e.g. a forged signature or an error in crediting payments of taxes to the wrong account). The likelihood that a quiet title action will vest title in the name of the seller is high, but the fact that the title company is not willing to insure title in its current state is strong circumstantial evidence that the risk that the seller does not have good title to the property is real. Your concerns are not unreasonable, and the safer course of action would be to restructure the deal so that you do not take title unless and until the title is quieted in the seller in a lawsuit conducted at his sole expense and risk, even if you move in pursuant to a lease pending that process. The existence of an (amended) real estate contract between you and the seller should be sufficient to protect your interest in the deal that you have struck between now and closing. It is possible that your financing could fall apart between now and closing, but often the circumstances that would make that happen are circumstances that would cause you to wish you never did the deal in the first place anyway. When I represented some heirs of a decedent in a similar case (involving a fraudulent sale to avoid a tax sale, rather than a tax sale itself, from a probate estate), the deal ultimately struck was to have the heirs sell the house to the buyer who was under contract, with proceeds split between the nominal owner of record and the heirs who might have had a claim to undo a prior sale. Such a resolution if there is a contested quiet title litigation, in lieu of taking the quiet title dispute to trial, is another resolution that would be fine with you if the closing is postponed until after the title dispute is resolved.
No. An eviction notice served while someone is an owner of record of a house would not be enforced. But, generally speaking, a divorce court retains jurisdiction to enforce its decrees after they are entered, and to clarify its existing orders. Obviously I will need to refinance it and pay him his share of the equity to get the deed solely in my name, which will take time. Usually, the ex's duty to get the deed in your name would precede the duty to refinance it. A deed from one owner of real estate to another co-owner doesn't violate a due on sales clause of a mortgage or deed of trust, and the fact that both of you are on the mortgage or deed of trust does not mean that both of you need to own it. Unless the decree says otherwise, the ex would usually have to transfer the property even if the mortgage is not yet refinanced. But, not all decrees and not all separation agreements have the same requirements and provisions. The exact language in the governing document would matter. If the decree doesn't say who gets to occupy the house, you could and probably should go to the court to have that issue clarified. Since violating a clear court order can give rise to contempt of court sanctions of incarceration or fines, often someone will comply with it without having to have the police intervene to remove someone. Conceivably, if the ex did not leave, you could seek to hold the ex in contempt of court for violating the divorce decree if it implies that the ex's right to occupy the house has ended. If the ex is found by the court to have willfully violated a court order following notice to the ex, an arraignment and a hearing if the violation was not conceded at the arraignment, the ex could face incarceration and/or fines (contempt proceedings are rather complicated and exactly how you do this is beyond the scope of a simple answer). You could also seek to hold the ex in contempt of court for not promptly signing the quitclaim deed (assuming that the decree does not condition the duty to do this on the refinancing of the house), but this would not be the best solution to that problem. This is because you could also go to the court and have it appoint the clerk of the court as the husband's agent to sign the quitclaim deed on behalf of the ex (assuming again that the decree does not condition the duty to do this on the refinancing of the house), if the ex failed to do so as required by the divorce decree by the deadline set forth in the decree, or a new court order, or within a reasonable time if not deadline is set. Then, after you were in title, you could bring an eviction action if necessary. It is much easier and faster to get an order directing the clerk to sign something on behalf of a party to a lawsuit than it is to hold someone in contempt of court. You could also ask the court to issue a protection order prohibiting him from occupying the house at any time prior to the title being put into your name pursuant to the decree. This could take effect as soon as the protection order signed/authorized by the judge is served upon the ex. A protection order (in most states) is directly enforceable by the police, unlike most court orders which are only enforceable by bringing contempt of court charges in the court that issued the order. But, a court would usually be reluctant to issue a protection order unless there was a clear and present risk of physical harm, or severe emotional harm to you from a violation of the decree. Also, while the ex wouldn't be committing the crime of trespassing by occupying the house, it wouldn't be unprecedented for you to persuade a police officer to remove the ex from the house after explaining the situation to prevent a breach of the peace between you, or because the ex's conduct in overstaying his right under the decree to be in the house constitutes "disorderly conduct" or "loitering" or "harassment" or some other minor offense in the opinion of the police officer, even if that charge might not hold up if prosecuted in court. But, there is really no way to compel a police officer to do that and it is close to the boundary of what a police officer does and doesn't have the authority to do. Most of these remedies would take several weeks, at a minimum, to complete. A protection order could be done in a day or two, subject to a prompt follow up hearing within a week or two after the fact. A court might also rule on a clarification order on an expedited basis by setting a shorter than usual deadline for the ex to respond given the urgency of the matter.
The fault lies with the people who vandalized your house. In general, whoever causes you damage is responsible (liable) for that damage. This is true whether or not you are selling your house, having guests over, letting a friend stay over for a night or a week, or whatever the circumstance is. Insurance is there to cover many such losses: if a friend trashes your house in a drunken rage, your insurance will cover the damage, but they will invoke the doctrine of subrogation whereby they get to go after the friend, and you have to cooperate. In a situation where nobody has a clue who did the damage, the only possible way that the agent has any responsibility is if they were negligent in their duty to take care of the house. For your specific case, you'd need to discuss the forensic facts with your attorney. But generally speaking, the issue would be whether the agent had breached his/her professional duty of care, which is best understood as comparing his actions (or lack) compares to actions of other professionals in the same circumstance. If a house has 3 or 4 sets of visitors simultaneously, it is really not possible for an agent to supervise all of them at once. So the question would be, was this the result of one concentrated vandalism attack, or serial vandalism. The former is more in the realm of "stuff happens", and the latter is indicative of an endemic lack of care. To repeat, the fault lies with the miscreants who vandalized your house. You, or your insurance company, may nevertheless have to bear the financial burden. Your insurance company will certainly have an interest in spreading responsibility to the realty firm, if warranted by the facts.
Are there any underlying reasons behind the nonsensical structure of U.S.C. titles? Is it simply a case of "This is how it's been for awhile, don't fix what isn't broken." or is there more to it than that? First of all, the United States Code is generally not designed to be used by non-lawyers. Second, one of the main ways to research case law interpreting a statute is by doing a boolean search on the code section of that statute. Every time you change a title or section number, you impair the ability of people doing legal research (both judges and lawyers) to find previous case law interpreting the meaning of the statute. Third, you make it much harder to determine when the substance of the provision was originally enacted (e.g. if you want legislative history or to determine which of two conflicting statutory provisions was enacted first) since an annotated statute will often show when the current section was enacted but will not explain what it was derived from. Fourth, the location of a statute within the context of other statutory sections often informs its meaning. Machine gun may have one definition in two or three laws, and a different one in two or three other laws, and there may be yet other laws where machine gun is an undefined term. Moving a statutory section from one part of the code to another could influence the default definition that one uses for an undefined term changing substantive law. Fifth, usually a new codification will also involve some drafting standards, for example, to add gender neutrality or to avoid notoriously ambiguous constructions (like 250 word sentences). But, it isn't at all uncommon for very slight changes like the position of a comma or the formatting of a section with multiple indents, to result in a change of the likely meaning of a somewhat ambiguous statute and it is pretty much impossible to know a priori when a statutory section is ambiguous until you are confronted with a fact pattern that makes the ambiguity in that context clear. This isn't confined to obscure laws of little importance. For example, the question of whether Obamacare applied in states that hadn't set up their own exchanges hinged on these kinds of issues. None of this is to say that you should never recodify the statutes. But, a basically aesthetic motivation that mostly matters to people who make up a tiny portion of the main users of the product (non-lawyers) that poses multiple threats to how statutes will be located using legal research tools, and how it will be interpreted once located, means that reorganizing statutes is not something to be done lightly. In short, there are a lot of serious, substantive costs that can accompany a recodification of a law. As a result, re-codification is most often done only as part of an overall omnibus reform of an area of law on the merits where the interest in being able to track prior interpretive caselaw and determine the original meaning of a statute enacted long ago is at its lowest. Barring the even more ridiculous case of Congress repealing everything and passing the exact same laws again, just under different Titles/Chapters/etc, This is not so ridiculous. Most states have done exactly that one or two times in their history (sometimes more for older states). Also, many newly admitted to the union states also do something similar. For example, the basic template for the statutes in Colorado was the statutes of the state of Illinois. Basically, the first time around, somebody started with an Illinois statute book, eliminated Illinois specific laws and laws that they didn't like, rearranged them and adopted them as the original statutes of the State of Colorado (it may have actually been version 2.0 after a stopgap set of statutes, I don't recall which). Also, most states completely repeal and readopt all of their statutes in codified form on the recommendation of the codifier to a legislative committee, to reflect the acts passed in the previous session, every year. This doesn't involve overhauls really, but in principle is a complete repeal and reenactment. While the federal government has never overhauled the entire U.S. Code in this manner, it has been done at the level of individual titles of the U.S. Code. For example, the most recent major reorganization and overhaul of the structure of the Internal Revenue Code (Title 26) was in 1986. The copyright laws were overhauled in the late 1970s. Both of those accompanied major substantive changes in those areas of law. Another major recodification of many parts of the U.S. Code took place following 9-11 in connection with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which reorganized both the bureaucracy and the associated U.S. Code language associated with dozens of federal agencies. would it be possible for Congress to arbitrarily merge, combine, and delete Titles, and to rearrange the location of laws, definitions, etc? Are there laws/regulations governing this? Yes. Congress can do so any time it wants by passing a bill (it would be the longest bill ever - dozens of volumes long) doing so, and getting the President to sign it. The legislative process would be exactly the same as any other bill.
At common law, a tenant is entitled to "quiet enjoyment" of the property. This means that the owner can only interact with the tenant as spelled out in the lease or in an emergency situation. First, calmly and quietly write down a list of your grievances. Then check your lease to see what the landlord is entitled to do. Cross off any grievances that are permitted by the lease. Take this and the lease to your solicitor and pay him to write a letter to your agent advising them of your grievances and asking that they stop. Without knowing where you are, we do not know what additional rights and dispute resolution procedures are available in your jurisdiction. Very few jurisdictions still rely entirely on common law as real estate is one of the most highly government regulated areas of life wherever you are. Your solicitor will know and, for less that a week's rent will give you solid advice.
You might take a look at this summary. You have an offer, consideration (a promise of something valuable), acceptance, and "mutuality" i.e. there was no confusion over what you are talking about. Email is a form of writing, and written contracts are the strongest that there are. In this case, the offeree relied on the contract in buying materials and who knows what else. If there's nothing surprising that you're not mentioning, a court would then obliged you to make him whole. That could be in the form of compensating him for his losses, or else ordering specific performance (i.e. making you sell the car). Specific performance is most likely with real estate deals where the seller reneges, but maybe not in this case, and maybe especially not in Wisconsin. It is likely that you could keep the car for a price, but you'd really need an attorney to advise you on that.
Yes, an HOA has a duty to treat all members equally You have my condolences. Dealing with an HOA board and/or fellow residents can be frustrating and exasperating. Unfortunately, as a practical matter, the high cost of legal advice often mean boards can ignore the law. In Pennsylvania, as everywhere, the Board of an HOA has a fiduciary relation to the owners. Because they are a fiduciary the Board has a legal duty to run the HOA for the benefit of the owners, not themselves or their friends. As the PA statutes puts it, the Board &quot;shall perform their duties...in good faith...in the best interests of the association...&quot; The duty to act &quot;in good faith&quot; is usually interpreted as including a duty to &quot;treat all community members equally...&quot; (For more on &quot;fiduciary,&quot; &quot;good faith&quot; and &quot;equal treatment&quot; see here, here and here.) Whether you are being treated equally depends on the particular facts of your situation, and on how exactly PA courts have interpreted PA law. While you might be able to find a good answer on line, chances are you'll need to talk to a PA attorney with experience in condo law. You should also check your condo's governing documents. They may contain specific provisions about how decisions about additions such as lighting are to be handled.
The acts in question don't distinguish between online and in person sales. Both are retail sales. A retail sale is a sale for use rather than a wholesale sale for resale. Wholesale sales are exempt from sales tax and so are easy to distinguish. Online sales are still retail sales. It is a distinction without a difference. Sales and Use Tax Law § 6007(a)(1) and common law case law would suffice. There is also case law under the UCC, and the relevant federal statutes. But, I doubt that the argument of the vendor would be that it didn't make a retail sale (at least once their lawyers got involved). More importantly, there is nothing that says that online sales aren't retail sales. Bob should contact the online sales department to seek a remedy since he was advised by the company to contact that department. But the part of the company handling his complaint doesn't change his rights. Warranty rights don't depend upon the intent of the parties. If a warranty arises and it good isn't as warranted, there is a legal right to a remedy. If a store doesn't honor one's legal warranty rights, then you sue the store for damages, typically, in a court of limited jurisdiction, or if there is an arbitration clause, in a consumer arbitration forum (some of which are not actively doing business due to controversies in recent years, leaving a judicial forum open).