Page:Tyler v. Hennepin County.pdf/14

Rh process and equal protection of the laws. Id., at 109. In their reply brief before this Court, the owners also argued for the first time that they had been denied just compensation under the Takings Clause. Ibid.

We rejected this belated argument. Lawton had suggested that withholding the surplus from a property owner always violated the Fifth Amendment, but there was no specific procedure there for recovering the surplus. Nelson, 352 U. S., at 110. New York City’s ordinance, in comparison, permitted the owner to recover the surplus but required that the owner have “filed a timely answer in [the] foreclosure proceeding, asserting his property had a value substantially exceeding the tax due.” Ibid. (citing New York v. Chapman Docks Co., 1 App. Div. 2d 895, 149 N. Y. S. 2d 679 (1956)). Had the owners challenging the ordinance done so, “a separate sale” could have taken place “so that [they] might receive the surplus.” 352 U. S., at 110. The owners did not take advantage of this procedure, so they forfeited their right to the surplus. Because the New York City ordinance did not “absolutely preclud[e] an owner from obtaining the surplus proceeds of a judicial sale,” but instead simply defined the process through which the owner could claim the surplus, we found no Takings Clause violation. Ibid.

Unlike in Nelson, Minnesota’s scheme provides no opportunity for the taxpayer to recover the excess value; once absolute title has transferred to the State, any excess value always remains with the State. The County argues that the delinquent taxpayer could sell her house to pay her tax debt before the County itself seizes and sells the house. But requiring a taxpayer to sell her house to avoid a taking is not the same as providing her an opportunity to recover the excess value of her house once the State has sold it.