Robert R. Turner v. Sharon W. Jordan, et al.

Suwannee County, Florida initiated a tax foreclosure sale of petitioner’s home, which was indisputably worth over $30,000, and sold it for roughly $3,500, leaving petitioner with nothing: without his home and without the surplus between the home’s value and its foreclosure sale price. In Fair Assessment in Real Estate Association v. McNary, 454 U.S. 100 (1981) and Levin v. Commerce Energy, Inc., 560 U.S. 413 (2010), this Court recognized that comity principles may require federal courts to abstain from deciding cases that risk disruption of state tax administration. Both the Second and Sixth Circuits have recognized McNary’s and Levin’s limits and would permit a constitutional takings suit to recover surplus value—like the one that petitioner brought in this case—to proceed because such suits do not impermissibly impede a state’s ability to collect taxes. See Dorce v. City of New York, 2 F.4th 82 (2d Cir. 2021); Freed v. Thomas, 976 F.3d 729 (6th Cir. 2020); Harrison v. Montgomery Cnty., 997 F.3d 643 (6th Cir. 2021). Over a dissent from Judge Newsom, an Eleventh Circuit majority concluded the opposite and thus created a circuit split. The creation of that circuit split is particularly egregious because, just two Terms ago, this Court held in Tyler v. Hennepin County, 598 U.S. 631 (2023), that a property’s surplus value is not a tax; thus, a takings suit to recover that surplus value risks no disruption of state tax administration. The question presented is: Whether federal courts must abstain from constitutional takings cases that seek to recover only the surplus value of a property that was taken pursuant to a tax foreclosure.