Court Opinion

ID: 9445769
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:37:58.360848+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:24.262963
License: Public Domain

JONES, Circuit Judge
(concurring in part and dissenting in part).
As is said by the majority, the facts are “strikingly simple”. Plaintiffs asserted ownership of property in Dallas, Texas. They invoked the provisions of 28 U.S.C.A. § 2410 and brought suit against the United States to quiet title to the property against a claim of lien of the United States. Plaintiffs sought a judgment that the United States had no interest in the property. The United States answered, asserting that it had a lien on the property prior to the title or other interest of the Plaintiffs. The District Court held with the plaintiffs and entered judgment decreeing that the United States had no lien on the property. The opinion of the majority will render judgment that the lien of the United States is superior. With this I am in complete accord.
In the majority opinion there is much discussion of lien priorities, foreclosures and other matters which seem to me to have passed out of the case. The plaintiffs assert no present lien. They claim title. No reason appears that would prevent the operation of the rule that when a lienholder acquires title the lien is merged with the title and is extinguished. 43A Tex.Jur. 422, Vendor and Purchaser, § 368. It was necessary to consider the lien of the plaintiffs as of the time the lien of the United States attached as a predicate for determining the rank of the lien of the United States. However, I am unable to see the “other questions” in the case for the disposition of which the majority has remanded. The majority undertakes, so it seems to me, to prescribe for ailments from which neither litigant is suffering. If I rightly read the majority opinion it may call for the foreclosure of a taxpayers’ lien which the taxpayers have, I think, extinguished and certainly have not asserted. But for the remand to dispose of “other questions” the taxpayers could (and probably still can) pay off and discharge the lien of the United States; and the United States could (but now probably cannot) avail itself of the remedies which the Congress has furnished for the collection of its tax from the property on which it has a lien. From the portion of the opinion which will remand the cause, I deferentially dissent.