The situation we are talking about is a purchase of property "under color of title". What this means is that the purchaser doesn't have good title to the property, but he believes in good faith that he does, and he has a document that purports to be a valid deed. The benefit of holding property under color of title as opposed to holding it in a completely adverse manner is that you can sue to quiet title in less time than someone who simply squats on the property without any evidence of ownership.
In Georgia, for example, the period of time needed to gain title through adverse possession (aka squatting) is 20 years. But if you hold under color of title, the time period is shortened to 4 years.
You are confusing this with laws about recording deeds, which are creatures of statute, not the common law... these statutes govern claims between two competing purchasers. They govern the priority of deeds, but they do not govern the fact pattern that we are dealing with here.
"The issue would be establishing whether there was legal notice of the defect."
Not at all. Remember the fact scenario we are dealing with: someone forged a power of attorney and purported to sell the house without any actual power to do so. There was no defect in the chain of title until the purchasers claimed to own property that they bought from a con-man.
State courts apply state law. State law is created by state legislatures. Ever heard of a state legislature passing a law to make itself liable in money damages for the other laws that it passes? Me neither.
To be clear, it's only money damages that I'm talking about. You are right that Congress can protect those fundamental rights that are incorporated into the 14th Amendment (actually it's not ALL of the same rights that exist under the Federal Constitution. For example, the 2nd Amendemnt right to bear arms does not apply to the states.) But those Federal rights can only be enforced through an injunction when you are sue a state.
I hope a huge financial penalty is imposed, and paid by the State, which in turn would hurt the taxpayers of that State. It's the only way to make them wake up and hold those responsible accountable.
Unfortunately this is prevented by the 11th Amendment... more precisely it is prevented by the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 11th Amendment.
The text of the Amendment only says that states are immune from suits brought by citizens of other states.
The Supremes say that a state is immune from money damages in a suit brought by anyone, even ITS OWN citizens. Where do they get this from? Thin air.
...the person would be subjected to the same registration and community notification requirements and restrictions on where he could live.
The restrictions on where you can live requirement is a big issue. Many states have created absurd rules for people on the registries, that basically make it illegal for them to live anywhere near a metropolitan area, because they can't live nearby a church, school, playground, anything.
In Dekalb County, Georgia, the sheriff said that there are no locations in the county where someone on the registry can legally reside... so those people have to move to the more rural areas. Hope the country-folk like having child molesters next door.
But I digress, the real deal with this thing is that it takes away a very important liberty interest for at least six years, with what sounds like a very limited procedure. We'll see, but this could turn out to be a violation of due process.
At any rate, I'm sure there are some spouses in divorce who are looking at this as a golden opportunity.
...and where the RIAA can sue nameless children and dead people! And where patent laws on trivial 'inventions' can be used for legally-sanctioned blackmail! And where baseless lawsuits can last several years without the slightest hint of evidence as long as they are backed by convicted monopolists!
Yeah, your system is much better...
I will happily accept all of the things you mentioned, if it means I get to keep my house.
Don't worry Canadians, he's required under the PATRIOT act to start all posts that way.
Hah! It's actually rare that I get to say that, because it's usually a story about something stupid that the US is doing. And don't get me wrong, the US is doing plenty stupid lately.
Except for habeas corpus. And there is that eminent domain thingy, too...
We still have the writ of habeas corpus, although it seems that some very bad exceptions have been made to it.
Obviously we still have eminent domain (a feature of English common law). Our constitution adds the requirement of just compensation, but I personally think that was a damn good idea.
In a free market, like we have in Canada, no one needs permission from anyone to sell something that is legally theirs. So "they" don't "let" anyone sell anything. We have a legal right to sell what is ours. The whole purpose of this fraud is to create the appearance that the property legally belongs to someone who does not in fact own it.
Not sure why you thought it important to make that point, but I completely agree.
The issue is whether a person who "buys" property from someone who never owned it becomes the owner of the property. My answer is no.
Caveat emptor is the normal rule, and it makes sense for a lot of reasons.
God bless America.
Elitist northern swine... go drink some Molson and chase a polar bear.
Ah, but you forget that there are two victims here - the seller and the purchaser.
No I've not. First of all, the seller is not a victim at all. He's a crook.
As for the purchaser, it is up to him to do his due diligence by investigating the chain of title and the identity of the seller. Beyond that, buyer's title insurance is available, and EVERYONE should ALWAYS buy a buyer's title insurance policy whenever they purchase real estate (do not confuse this with the lender's policy which you will also pay for at closing).
The owner will usually have no opportunity to prevent this type of fraud. The buyer always will.
On another note, Canadian law outside of Quebec is based on English common law.
Yes, but this is one area where they have deviated from the common law in a very stupid way. The common law rule is that you do not have the power to sell something that you do not own. The only way to "steal" real estate should be through adverse possession. But that requires that someone occupy (possess) the property adversely, exclusively and openly for several years without any action taken by the rightful owner.
You do not have the "right" to receive whatever performance the contract requires of the other parties you have contracted with. All parties of a contract have the right to breach that contract at any time for any reason.
"Rights" are exactly what contracts create. If they didn't, they would be worthless, and a large portion of commerce in this world would cease to occur.
How courts enforce those rights may vary. In the US courts, monetary damages will be awarded if it is possible to calculate them (usually it is current value of the consideration minus its value at the time of contracting). In some cases, however, specific performance (i.e. an order, forcing the other party to perform) will be awarded. Obviously, personal service cannot be ordered (see 13th amendment, no forced servitude). But where there is a sales contract for a unique piece of real estate, many courts will force the sale to go through even though the owner has changed his mind after signing the contract.
If you contracted to receive email through a service, and they deliberately blocked legitimate email from going to your in-box, you would generally have a cause of action. As someone else pointed out, the terms of service probably give them a big loophole for "attempting to prevent spam" or if it doesn't they would be stupid not to have that in there.
A contract is an agreement whereby two parties exchange consideration. One party's consideration might be a promise to pay money now or in the future. The other party's consideration might be a promise to provide a service, such as email.
When you form a contract with another party, you earn a "right" to receive the consideration from them that you bargained for.
Amazingly enough, courts will actually enforce this right. I'll be around in case you need any more corrections of your obviously wrong assumptions. Thank you.
And one requirement for the judge to issue a preliminary injunction is that he has to determine that the benefitting party is likely to win the suit. So by issuing it, he has to have already reached a decision about the merits of the case.
It's true that it isn't the end, but it definitely points to one side as the likely winner.
What these Anonymous Cowards need to do is realize that the environment is everyone's problem, not just "these environmentalists".
You do raise a good point. With the human population as it is today, there are some very serious choices that we (humans) need to make regarding how to persevere in a sustainable way.
Whenever I have to reinstall windows (or more often, linux since my main computer runs a different distro about every week), I do an audit of all my data.
First, write down what you need to keep: emails? accounting data from Quicken? config info from other applications? bookmarks? Get it all down and back up everything to an external drive or a CDR.
Second, reinstall the OS and all applications. If you went through the whole harddrive, directory by directory, you should have saved all the config files and data files that you needed. If you didn't, then you should have gone more slowly and carefully.
It is best to do a reinstall anyway, because if they've been running Windows for a long time, they probably have a lot of cruft... left-over services and other junk from programs they don't run anymore that are slowing down their machine... and there's always the possibility of malware lurking in the shadows.
A reinstall takes care of all those things. Tell them not to be afraid, just patient and careful.
This is going to piss off a whole lot of people who don't understand it.
While it may be possible legally, politically, it would be a firestorm.
People outside those states won't like the idea that the bigger states are making the decision for them. And people inside those states won't like the idea that their electoral college votes are no longer based on the votes in their states.
Of course anything to reduce the spread of the original bird flu also reduces the opportunity for a mutated strain to develop, and is therefore a good thing. But let's not misunderstand what's been achieved here.
But that is exactly what makes it important. India having it's own vaccine means that she can do a much better job of innoculating her own chickens, which dramatically reduces the likelihood that a mutated human-to-human-contagious form of the disease would come from India.
Being that India is the 2nd most populated country in the world, I'd say that this is very significant.
At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.
Certainly it is true. Also, at their worst, people are active deceivers, powerful tyrants, not saints.
Wikipedia is a good resource for getting your foot in the door on a topic, but it is imperfect just as people are imperfect. If you take it for what it is, it does no harm.
It is true that the worst sides of humanity are able to emerge when there is little oversight. But it may also be true that the best sides can emerge under the same circumstances.
The judge rejected the argument. "The fallacy in the argument is that if the bank does not accept the EULA [licence] terms [by operating the software and agreeing the terms], it receives no licence. Thus it can confer no licence for the use of any Microsoft software by passing on the COA (certificate of authenticity), nor can the COA be evidence of, or itself confer, such a licence. Thus, provided that the licensing system is enforceable in law, the circumstances exemplified cannot give rise to a legitimate trade in COAs."
The judge is saying that a "certificate of authenticity" is just what it says... a certificate that you can use to evidence that your software is genuine and not counterfeit.
The COA is not a license, but merely evidence of a license. If you take someone else's COA and put it with your counterfeit copy of the software, you have not "received a license".
The people who sold the COA never accepted the license, so they could not have transferred a license that they did not have. This is similar to the way the GPL works... you either agree to the terms and abide by them, or you don't have a license.
February 2001: Some people were planning to attack the WTC.
True, but that was something that was going on for a while, and we didn't find out about until later.
I'm thinking of something that specifically happened in early 2001.
From what I can recall, someone raised their right hand and took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Maybe someone else can fill in the other details.
From TFA: Borough labor lawyer Ellen Horn, who also represented the library trustees, said Reutty was "more interested in protecting" her library than helping the police.
"It was an absolute misjudgment of the seriousness of the matter," Horn said at Tuesday's meeting.
What utter bullshit. She doesn't work for the police, and it is her job and her legal mandate to protect the privacy of people who check out books from her library.
These "borough officials" are nothing but a bunch of grandstanding politician assholes trying to make their careers by harassing a librarian who was doing her job the way it should be done. They should all be voted out of office.
We're all going to die while the people who've been listening to Rush Limbaugh for the past fifteen years just keep repeating "prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it"
Slashdot Mirror
The situation we are talking about is a purchase of property "under color of title". What this means is that the purchaser doesn't have good title to the property, but he believes in good faith that he does, and he has a document that purports to be a valid deed. The benefit of holding property under color of title as opposed to holding it in a completely adverse manner is that you can sue to quiet title in less time than someone who simply squats on the property without any evidence of ownership.
In Georgia, for example, the period of time needed to gain title through adverse possession (aka squatting) is 20 years. But if you hold under color of title, the time period is shortened to 4 years.
You are confusing this with laws about recording deeds, which are creatures of statute, not the common law... these statutes govern claims between two competing purchasers. They govern the priority of deeds, but they do not govern the fact pattern that we are dealing with here.
"The issue would be establishing whether there was legal notice of the defect."
Not at all. Remember the fact scenario we are dealing with: someone forged a power of attorney and purported to sell the house without any actual power to do so. There was no defect in the chain of title until the purchasers claimed to own property that they bought from a con-man.
Definitely, if the professor's objective is to ensure attendance by the students, then requiring attendance is the way to bring that about.
If there isn't enough time to call the roll, have it on the honor system... or call the roll at random intervals... whatever.
Limiting a resource (podcasts) so that you miss out on your education just because you missed a class doesn't help anyone. It's silly.
State courts apply state law. State law is created by state legislatures. Ever heard of a state legislature passing a law to make itself liable in money damages for the other laws that it passes? Me neither.
To be clear, it's only money damages that I'm talking about. You are right that Congress can protect those fundamental rights that are incorporated into the 14th Amendment (actually it's not ALL of the same rights that exist under the Federal Constitution. For example, the 2nd Amendemnt right to bear arms does not apply to the states.) But those Federal rights can only be enforced through an injunction when you are sue a state.
I hope a huge financial penalty is imposed, and paid by the State, which in turn would hurt the taxpayers of that State. It's the only way to make them wake up and hold those responsible accountable.
Unfortunately this is prevented by the 11th Amendment... more precisely it is prevented by the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 11th Amendment.
The text of the Amendment only says that states are immune from suits brought by citizens of other states.
The Supremes say that a state is immune from money damages in a suit brought by anyone, even ITS OWN citizens. Where do they get this from? Thin air.
The restrictions on where you can live requirement is a big issue. Many states have created absurd rules for people on the registries, that basically make it illegal for them to live anywhere near a metropolitan area, because they can't live nearby a church, school, playground, anything.
In Dekalb County, Georgia, the sheriff said that there are no locations in the county where someone on the registry can legally reside... so those people have to move to the more rural areas. Hope the country-folk like having child molesters next door.
But I digress, the real deal with this thing is that it takes away a very important liberty interest for at least six years, with what sounds like a very limited procedure. We'll see, but this could turn out to be a violation of due process.
At any rate, I'm sure there are some spouses in divorce who are looking at this as a golden opportunity.
...and where the RIAA can sue nameless children and dead people! And where patent laws on trivial 'inventions' can be used for legally-sanctioned blackmail! And where baseless lawsuits can last several years without the slightest hint of evidence as long as they are backed by convicted monopolists!
Yeah, your system is much better...
I will happily accept all of the things you mentioned, if it means I get to keep my house.
Don't worry Canadians, he's required under the PATRIOT act to start all posts that way.
Hah! It's actually rare that I get to say that, because it's usually a story about something stupid that the US is doing. And don't get me wrong, the US is doing plenty stupid lately.
Except for habeas corpus. And there is that eminent domain thingy, too...
We still have the writ of habeas corpus, although it seems that some very bad exceptions have been made to it.
Obviously we still have eminent domain (a feature of English common law). Our constitution adds the requirement of just compensation, but I personally think that was a damn good idea.
In a free market, like we have in Canada, no one needs permission from anyone to sell something that is legally theirs. So "they" don't "let" anyone sell anything. We have a legal right to sell what is ours. The whole purpose of this fraud is to create the appearance that the property legally belongs to someone who does not in fact own it.
Not sure why you thought it important to make that point, but I completely agree.
The issue is whether a person who "buys" property from someone who never owned it becomes the owner of the property. My answer is no.
Caveat emptor is the normal rule, and it makes sense for a lot of reasons.
God bless America.
Elitist northern swine... go drink some Molson and chase a polar bear.
Ah, but you forget that there are two victims here - the seller and the purchaser.
No I've not. First of all, the seller is not a victim at all. He's a crook.
As for the purchaser, it is up to him to do his due diligence by investigating the chain of title and the identity of the seller. Beyond that, buyer's title insurance is available, and EVERYONE should ALWAYS buy a buyer's title insurance policy whenever they purchase real estate (do not confuse this with the lender's policy which you will also pay for at closing).
The owner will usually have no opportunity to prevent this type of fraud. The buyer always will.
On another note, Canadian law outside of Quebec is based on English common law.
Yes, but this is one area where they have deviated from the common law in a very stupid way. The common law rule is that you do not have the power to sell something that you do not own. The only way to "steal" real estate should be through adverse possession. But that requires that someone occupy (possess) the property adversely, exclusively and openly for several years without any action taken by the rightful owner.
I am glad that I live in America, where we at least retain some of the more important aspects of English common law...
Who came up with the idea that they should let someone else sell your home as long as they can successfully trick the buyer?
Whoever it was, they should be shot.
You do not have the "right" to receive whatever performance the contract requires of the other parties you have contracted with. All parties of a contract have the right to breach that contract at any time for any reason.
"Rights" are exactly what contracts create. If they didn't, they would be worthless, and a large portion of commerce in this world would cease to occur.
How courts enforce those rights may vary. In the US courts, monetary damages will be awarded if it is possible to calculate them (usually it is current value of the consideration minus its value at the time of contracting). In some cases, however, specific performance (i.e. an order, forcing the other party to perform) will be awarded. Obviously, personal service cannot be ordered (see 13th amendment, no forced servitude). But where there is a sales contract for a unique piece of real estate, many courts will force the sale to go through even though the owner has changed his mind after signing the contract.
If you contracted to receive email through a service, and they deliberately blocked legitimate email from going to your in-box, you would generally have a cause of action. As someone else pointed out, the terms of service probably give them a big loophole for "attempting to prevent spam" or if it doesn't they would be stupid not to have that in there.
A contract is an agreement whereby two parties exchange consideration. One party's consideration might be a promise to pay money now or in the future. The other party's consideration might be a promise to provide a service, such as email.
When you form a contract with another party, you earn a "right" to receive the consideration from them that you bargained for.
Amazingly enough, courts will actually enforce this right. I'll be around in case you need any more corrections of your obviously wrong assumptions. Thank you.
Considering that the New York Times has itself recommended BugMeNot, I think that's perhaps not the greatest example of slashdot's "attitude."
And one requirement for the judge to issue a preliminary injunction is that he has to determine that the benefitting party is likely to win the suit. So by issuing it, he has to have already reached a decision about the merits of the case.
It's true that it isn't the end, but it definitely points to one side as the likely winner.
I was going to post "cue the collective groans of 90% of slashdot readers."
Looks like the groaning beat its cue.
What these Anonymous Cowards need to do is realize that the environment is everyone's problem, not just "these environmentalists".
You do raise a good point. With the human population as it is today, there are some very serious choices that we (humans) need to make regarding how to persevere in a sustainable way.
What would you do in this situation?
Whenever I have to reinstall windows (or more often, linux since my main computer runs a different distro about every week), I do an audit of all my data.
First, write down what you need to keep: emails? accounting data from Quicken? config info from other applications? bookmarks? Get it all down and back up everything to an external drive or a CDR.
Second, reinstall the OS and all applications. If you went through the whole harddrive, directory by directory, you should have saved all the config files and data files that you needed. If you didn't, then you should have gone more slowly and carefully.
It is best to do a reinstall anyway, because if they've been running Windows for a long time, they probably have a lot of cruft... left-over services and other junk from programs they don't run anymore that are slowing down their machine... and there's always the possibility of malware lurking in the shadows.
A reinstall takes care of all those things. Tell them not to be afraid, just patient and careful.
This is going to piss off a whole lot of people who don't understand it.
While it may be possible legally, politically, it would be a firestorm.
People outside those states won't like the idea that the bigger states are making the decision for them. And people inside those states won't like the idea that their electoral college votes are no longer based on the votes in their states.
Of course anything to reduce the spread of the original bird flu also reduces the opportunity for a mutated strain to develop, and is therefore a good thing. But let's not misunderstand what's been achieved here.
But that is exactly what makes it important. India having it's own vaccine means that she can do a much better job of innoculating her own chickens, which dramatically reduces the likelihood that a mutated human-to-human-contagious form of the disease would come from India.
Being that India is the 2nd most populated country in the world, I'd say that this is very significant.
At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.
Certainly it is true. Also, at their worst, people are active deceivers, powerful tyrants, not saints.
Wikipedia is a good resource for getting your foot in the door on a topic, but it is imperfect just as people are imperfect. If you take it for what it is, it does no harm.
It is true that the worst sides of humanity are able to emerge when there is little oversight. But it may also be true that the best sides can emerge under the same circumstances.
The judge rejected the argument. "The fallacy in the argument is that if the bank does not accept the EULA [licence] terms [by operating the software and agreeing the terms], it receives no licence. Thus it can confer no licence for the use of any Microsoft software by passing on the COA (certificate of authenticity), nor can the COA be evidence of, or itself confer, such a licence. Thus, provided that the licensing system is enforceable in law, the circumstances exemplified cannot give rise to a legitimate trade in COAs."
The judge is saying that a "certificate of authenticity" is just what it says... a certificate that you can use to evidence that your software is genuine and not counterfeit.
The COA is not a license, but merely evidence of a license. If you take someone else's COA and put it with your counterfeit copy of the software, you have not "received a license".
The people who sold the COA never accepted the license, so they could not have transferred a license that they did not have. This is similar to the way the GPL works... you either agree to the terms and abide by them, or you don't have a license.
February 2001: Some people were planning to attack the WTC.
True, but that was something that was going on for a while, and we didn't find out about until later.
I'm thinking of something that specifically happened in early 2001.
From what I can recall, someone raised their right hand and took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Maybe someone else can fill in the other details.
That would have been somewhere around February, 2001. What else was going on around that time?
I'm trying to think really hard about this. Early 2001... what important development took place in early 2001?
Gosh, I'm at a loss here. Maybe someone else can help out.
From TFA:
Borough labor lawyer Ellen Horn, who also represented the library trustees, said Reutty was "more interested in protecting" her library than helping the police.
"It was an absolute misjudgment of the seriousness of the matter," Horn said at Tuesday's meeting.
What utter bullshit. She doesn't work for the police, and it is her job and her legal mandate to protect the privacy of people who check out books from her library.
These "borough officials" are nothing but a bunch of grandstanding politician assholes trying to make their careers by harassing a librarian who was doing her job the way it should be done. They should all be voted out of office.
We're all going to die while the people who've been listening to Rush Limbaugh for the past fifteen years just keep repeating "prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it"