What you’ll pay now.

At least at first, the price is fixed. It’s the amount of taxes due on the property plus interest and costs for the advertisement and sale of the property. Unsurprisingly, this is often quite a lot less money than the property is worth. In municipalities with over 450,000 residents, if the property doesn’t sell for the asking price, the tax collector can offer the property for sale again with no minimum bid. But before you get too excited about your fantastic deal, you should know that there are a few little wrinkles.

You don’t fully own the property right away. If you buy at the tax sale, you purchase a “tax deed” from the tax collector and you have something called “tax sale title.” Some time after the tax sale, the tax collector will file a tax sale certificate in the parish’s public records. That certificate makes your tax sale victory official and formally notifies everyone that you bought the property’s tax title. But more importantly, the recordation starts the clock running on the last owner’s redemptive period.

Redemption.

After a tax sale, the owner of the property can redeem the property—i.e., get full ownership back—for a period of three years from the date the certificate is recorded. In New Orleans, the redemptive period is shortened to eighteen months if you purchase blighted or abandoned residential or commercial property. To redeem the property, an owner has to pay the price you paid (including any taxes you have paid on the property since the tax sale) plus a 5% penalty, plus 1% interest per month and whatever costs the tax collector imposes for the transaction. You, as the tax sale purchaser, get everything but the new costs.

What’s that mean in practice? First, the upside: if the person redeems the property, you’ll get all the money you spent on it in taxes and tax sale fees back plus some. Keep in mind that 1% interest per month gives you a 12.68% APR. It’s hard to sneeze at that kind of interest. The downside is that for at least three years, your title is uncertain. You can’t do very much with the property if you don’t know whether you’ll still own it next week. The other downside is that you may be required to take care of the property in the meantime. The city or parish might insist you cut the grass regularly or clear debris or tear down a dilapidated structure. And that could cost you money (or fines, if you refuse).

Possession

But before you can even go cut the grass, you have to figure out whether you have a legal right to enter the property. Normally in Louisiana, when you buy something, ownership comes with the right to possess the thing you bought. But in this case, you didn’t buy full ownership; you only bought a tax title.

As a rule, a tax purchaser is entitled to immediate possession of the property he purchased. But he can exercise possession of the property without any formalities only if he can do so without any resistance. If you buy a piece of property at a tax sale that doesn’t have anyone on it—a vacant lot, for example—you’re golden. You can walk right in and cut the grass, park your car on it, pitch a tent, etc.

The situation becomes a little bit trickier when other people get involved. For example, say you just bought an apartment complex at a tax sale. There are tenants residing in the apartments. They don’t want to pay you rent, so you want to evict them. At that point, a court needs to get involved, and you’ll need to follow all the proper procedures for establishing your right to possess the property. That topic is beyond the scope of this post; you should consult an attorney.

But the law does provide for automatic recognition of your right to possess the property if a parish or other government orders you to make changes to the property to comply with property standards, e.g., by cutting tall grass or removing debris. In that case, the you are entitled to an order from a court commanding the sheriff to seize the property and hand it over to you without a hearing. You probably should still get the help of an attorney. This statute outlines the procedure.

Quieting title.

If you make it through the whole redemptive period without having the property redeemed, congratulations are in order. But there are a few things left to do before you celebrate. The process is charmingly called “quieting a tax title,” and you’re probably going to need an attorney’s help to put it to bed. Louisiana’s statutes lay out the process; basically, you file a lawsuit against the former owners of the property and ask the court to terminate their ownership and recognize yours. Once the old owners are served with your lawsuit, they have six months to try to annul the tax sale. If they don’t, the property will officially be yours forever after.

Tax sales and you.

I like to go to tax sales. Sometimes I even buy stuff. But that’s me. Before you go haring off the to the next sale, talk to your legal and financial advisors. Talk to your spouse. Ask yourself if you can afford to spend the money required to maintain the property and pay the taxes while you wait for the redemptive period to pass. It can be a huge investment, both in terms of time and money. And don’t forget you’re almost certainly going to have to hire an attorney to at some point, so factor that cost in. But it can also be a spectacular investment.

Opposing Viewpoints is a long-running series that dedicates a whole volume to each of a range of controversial topics. The books present the major issues and sub-issues in a pro–con format using articles, cartoons, quotations, and other materials collected from many sources. They’re designed to give children a fairly balanced overview of the topics from all the major sides.

Today, Ars published an op-ed piece disagreeing with that article. It’s worth the read for anyone who does make or may make future security and IT infrastructure decisions.

The author points out the ever-increasing number of corporate data breaches and suggests that VPNs can alleviate a lot of the problems. After walking through a real-life corporate breach and how it might have been prevented, the author warns, “while VPNs might not be a perfect solution to every problem, they serve a critical purpose in today’s world where, indeed, we’re all telecommuters. Abandoning VPNs because you heard they are inconvenient is, frankly, a reckless and potentially devastating mistake.”

The cost of a ticket is the price of a copy of the book at Octavia. You trade the ticket for the book at the signing. Unfortunately, the store’s website indicates that Alton will only be signing books purchased from the store. I bought my ticket yesterday, and it came to just over $40 with in-store pickup. Also, for those who want pictures with AB, keep in mind his no-camera-phone policy (third paragraph from the bottom) and bring a real camera.

See you there!

Now onto the interesting stuff.

Recently, a Thingiverse user posted a file that can be printed on a 3d printer to create a (theoretically) functional AR-15 lower receiver. This upset some members of the Thingiverse community, as you can see from the lively discussion on the project page. Tech  Crunch covered the controversy and asked a few important questions. Is printing a gun the same as buying a gun? Is the printed lower receiver a weapon? Is it a part? Is it Illegal?

In short, no, printing a gun isn’t the same as buying one because the user is a manufacturer instead of a consumer. The lower receiver is still a firearm under federal law (and probably state law) as opposed to being just a part. And, finally, printing a lower is not prohibited under federal law for those allowed to own firearms, but your state’s law may vary.

For those of you who don’t regularly build your own firearms, the lower receiver of an AR-15 is a part typically made out of anodized aluminum that contains most of the gun’s moving parts. The AR-15′s lower receiver houses its trigger and fire-control components (the “safety” on a semi-automatic AR-15)  and is the attachment hub for the weapon’s other pieces — e.g., magazine, buttstock, grip, and upper receiver (which contains the barrel and chamber). In the image above, the bottommost object is a lower receiver with grip and trigger pack installed. The other two objects are completed AR-15s in different configurations.

The lower receiver is the only part of an AR-15 that must be serial-numbered. Why? Because, as far as the BATFE is concerned, the lower receiver — even if it’s separated from the barrel, stock, and all its other parts — is a firearm. Under the Gun Control Act of 1968 (18 U.S.C. § 921, et seq.), the definition of “firearm” includes the frame or receiver of any “weapon (including a starter gun) which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.” 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(3).

Since the lower receiver is a firearm, it’s subject to all the same laws and restrictions as a complete gun, e.g., background checks, retail sale through a licensed dealer, state law requirements, etc. The other parts you would buy to turn a lower receiver into a rifle are all available without any (federal) restrictions. For example, you can buy a lower receiver from your local gun shop, have the rest of the parts shipped directly to your house from internet sites, and assemble it on the kitchen table.

And while it is unlawful for an unlicensed person to engage in the business of manufacturing firearms under 18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(1)(A), it is not illegal for a person to manufacture firearms for his own use. From the ATF’s handy Federal Firearms Regulations Reference Guide:

With certain exceptions a firearm may be made by a nonlicensee provided it is not for sale and the maker is not prohibited from possessing firearms. However, a person is prohibited from assembling a nonsporting semi-automatic rifle or nonsporting shotgun from imported parts. In addition, the making of an NFA firearm requires a tax payment and approval by ATF. An application to make a machinegun will not be approved unless documentation is submitted showing that the firearm is being made for a Federal or State agency.

So, for most people in most places, it’s legal to print off a lower receiver and go about building an AR-15 on it. Certain states prohibit the private ownership of AR-15s with certain features (e.g., telescoping buttstocks and flash suppresors), so anyone trying this should consult someone familiar with his local laws. Some states also have permitting and licensing requirements that may apply to printing this project. Fortunately, Louisiana is a pretty free state when it comes to firearms laws, so printing off a lower wouldn’t pose any legal problem as long the proud owner is not prohibited from possessing firearms generally (because he’s a felon or prone to domestic abuse, for example).

Once the new owner starts attaching other parts to his shiny new lower, there are some things to watch out for. The bits in the ATF blurb about “assembling a nonsporting semi-automatic rifle or nonsporting shotgun from imported parts” don’t apply here, as the United States manufactures plenty of domestic AR-15 parts. Those regulations sometimes present a problem when someone wants to build a foreign-made rifle (like an FN-FAL, for example) from a kit made out of a decommissioned (read: cutting-torched into pieces) rifle that’s been imported as parts. That’s a different set of problems.

But the last two sentences can’t be disregarded quite so cavalierly. An “NFA firearm” is a firearm regulated by the National Firearms Act 26 U.S.C. § 5801, et seq. The NFA is a tax statute designed to impose restrictions and taxes on the production and transfer of certain weapons, primarily short-barreled shotguns and rifles,  machineguns, silencers, and destructive devices. For this post, we can safely ignore the regulations concerning concerning short-barreled shotguns, silencers, and destructive devices. We can also ignore the machinegun provisions of the NFA because semi-automatic AR-15 receivers have a handful of crucial differences in their design that prevent them from being converted into automatic weapons (without some substantial gunsmithing or illegal accessories).

But what about the short-barreled rifle regulations? It’s conceivable that someone could inadvertently make a short-barreled rifle. Under the NFA, a rifle is “a weapon designed . . . and intended to be fired from the shoulder and designed . . . use the energy of the explosive in a fixed cartridge to fire only a single projectile through a rifled bore for each single pull of the trigger.” 26 U.S.C. § 5845(c). So the NFA regulates rifles with barrels less than sixteen inches long. 26 U.S.C. § 5845(a)(1). Such a rifle is commonly called a short-barreled rifle (or SBR).

It is not illegal to manufacture an SBR (in this case, for example, by attaching an upper receiver with a 15″ barrel to your freshly made lower receiver) under federal law, as long as you’ve followed the correct application procedure and paid the applicable taxes. See 26 U.S.C. § 5822. Some states impose restrictions on the manufacture and possession of NFA firearms, including SBRs. For example, New Jersey prohibits the possession short-barreled rifles and shotguns outright. NJSA 2C:39-3(b) (the definition of “sawed-off shotgun,” for whatever reason, also includes rifles). Louisiana, on the other hand, does not prohibit ownership of any NFA weapons. Anyone who decides to try this project should acquaint himself with the laws beyond just whether he can legally print a lower receiver.

AR-15s were always like Lego. You bought a lower receiver and then a bunch of pieces to put on it. You could pick and choose whatever you wanted, take it off if you didn’t like it, or change it up between range days. Now that AR-15 lowers can be easily printed by 3d printers, the Lego simile is even more apt. And as long as you’re careful, you won’t even break the law!

Police got a break in the murder investigation when an informant reported that Reilly had been bragging about the murder. After pleading, Reilly was sentenced to twenty years in prison and was released on parole after twelve.

Now he’s out, and he’s attending Tulane Law School on scholarship. How do the people who applied to Tulane and were rejected feel now that they know who they lost out to? And why would Tulane bother admitting him? J.D.s are refused admission to the bar for misdemeanor DUIs and minor drug convictions all the time; Reilly has no hope of practicing law anywhere. Is it a publicity stunt?

Whatever the school’s reasoning, it’s offensive that Tulane wasted the seat and a scholarship on someone who’ll never practice law. Reilly is a prisoner’s rights advocate. The school should have passed on him and admitted a student with similar interests but less stabby hobbies. That student could have made a difference with his J.D.

The silver lining here, of course, is that Tulane is adopting a progressive, more lenient stance on crime. This is what one of the Deans said after a student stole Mr. Rogers’s shoe a while back:

I’m afraid I cannot overemphasize the gravity of this incident. It appears that one of the students of this Law School committed theft, a serious crime. It is also a violation of the Tulane University Code of Student Conduct. Moreover, what was stolen was of very high value. . . . I hope it is obvious that being under suspicion or arrested in connection with this incident would have the most serious negative implications for your future career as a lawyer.

Thank god Reilly only killed someone to steal his Ford Tempo and not something of very high value. Otherwise, it might have had negative implications for his future legal career.

At least he’s not a gunner.

I’m on vacation and hadn’t planned on blogging again until I got home, but I need to share Ready Player One. I first read about it on boing boing around the time it was released. After a short wait on my reading list, I downloaded it.

I started reading it yesterday evening after we got back from vacation activities and kept going until 3 A.M. It broke my heart to put it down, but I needed some sleep. So when we got back to the hotel this evening, I picked it up and didn’t put it down again until I finished it.

The setting is comfortably reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, another one of my favorites. It’s the near future. Technology has advanced some beyond today’s standards, but it’s not Star Trek. Life mostly sucks for everyone who isn’t super-rich or privileged or both. The world is largely controlled by huge, nearly omnipotent corporations that have begun supplanting government.

In the book’s world, the most important technology is an immersive virtual online world called the OASIS, and just about every one on the planet spends as much time as possible inside the simulation. They live there, they shop there, they make friends and find love there. In short, the OASIS is a much better place to be than the crushing poverty and  misery of their real lives.

When the creator of the OASIS — an eccentric, absurdly wealthy man named James Halliday — dies, he leaves his fortune to whomever can solve the in-OASIS riddles he left behind. That inheritance includes a controlling interest in the company that owns the OASIS and will make the heir one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world.

And the world responds. Thousands and thousands of OASIS users begin the hunt for clues, but are unsuccessful. Several years after the hunt begins, the book picks up the story of Wade Watts, a high school student obsessed with solving Halliday’s puzzles, and sees the hunt through to its end.

Ready Player One is very well written. And it has a insistent, driving rhythm that never lets go. I was never bored (I’m looking at you,A Song of Ice and Fire) and can’t think of any parts of the plot or any important characters I didn’t honestly care about. It has everything I could want in a novel. It’s fast-paced. The puzzles are neat. And I was sad to see it end.

Best of all, the author has an encyclopedic knowledge of the pop-culture, trivia, and video games of the 80s, which he puts to great use: James Halliday was obsessed with the 80s, the decade in which he was a teenager, and bases his puzzles on it. It’s flat-out incredible how much 80s junk is packed into this novel, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy with nostalgia.

Daniel H. Wilson hit the nail right on the head with his blurb on the Amazon site:

“I really, really loved READY PLAYER ONE…Cline expertly mines a copious vein of 1980s pop culture, catapulting the reader on a light-speed adventure in an advanced but backward-looking future.”— Daniel H. Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse [which you should also absolutely read; it's amazing].

Ready Player One is fantastic. The only problem with it is that it ends.

In Louisiana, many lawsuits are subject to one year liberative prescription. What that means, effectively, is that after an accident or storm or other event that damages a person, that person has one year to bring a lawsuit to make him whole, either against the person who did him harm or against his insurer or both. Normally, if the person doesn’t bring his lawsuit within the one-year window, he can never bring it.

But after Katrina, the legislature extended the normal prescriptive period because of the huge number of insurance claims and the general disorder left in the storm’s wake. The legislature extended the deadline from August 29, 2006, to September 1, 2007, unless a longer period was provided by law or contract.

But a recent Louisiana Supreme Court decision has effectively extended that deadline indefinitely.

In Taranto v. Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, 2010-0105  (La. 3/15/10), the Court held that the filing of a class action within the prescriptive period suspends the running of prescription as to all the members of the putative class. If class certification is denied, the class is redefined to exclude certain former putative class members, or putative class members opt out, the prescriptive period begins to run again with respect to those parties only.

In Taranto, the plaintiffs filed a petition against Citizens on June 27, 2008 (almost a year after the legislative cutoff of September 1, 2007). Citizens filed an exception of prescription, arguing that the plaintiffs’ claims prescribed, at the latest in September of 2007. The trial court sustained the exception and dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims with prejudice.

The Fourth Circuit reversed the trial court and held that the prescriptive period was interrupted by the filing of a class action against Citizens on August 26, 2006, since the plaintiffs were putative class members. Citizens filed a writ of certiorari, and the Louisiana Supreme Court granted its application.

First, the Court examined the law of prescription and found that, despite the general ten year prescriptive period for claims on a contract, the insurance contract at issue in the case required the plaintiffs to file suit within one year of the date of the loss. The Court rejected Citizens’s argument that the one year time limitation in the policy was a contractual limitation and not a prescriptive period (and therefore not subject to interruption or suspension).

Instead, the Court found that the “contractual limitation … merely adopts the Louisiana statutory prescriptive period to file claims” and that, consequently, the period was subject to the laws governing  prescription, including those concerning suspension. The Court reasoned that, by law, Louisiana insurance policies must allow claimants to make claims for at least one year after the loss. Accordingly, the period is partially statutory and, therefore, subject to legislative extension. The Court also found that the legislature extended the prescriptive periods and did not make them peremptive periods.

Since the period at issue in Taranto was a prescriptive period, they could be suspended. Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure Article 596 suspends prescription as to all members of a putative class when the class action is filed. Prescription begins to run again if certain events occur. If a person opts out of the class, prescription begins running again thirty days after he submits his opt-out form. Similarly, if a the class is restricted to exclude certain former putative members or if the class-action claims are stricken entirely, prescription begins to run against the former putative class members thirty days after notice of their ejection from the class is mailed or otherwise published.

The Court found that the Taranto plaintiffs were putative class members in the Buxton and Chalona class actions filed on August 25, 2006, and that prescription was suspended as to them on that date. The Court noted that Buxton was denied class certification on August 9, 2007, but that no order had been entered requiring notice to the putative class. The Court also noted that the Taranto plaintiffs were restricted out of the Chalona class definition on January 25, 2008, but that notice was not given until April 24, 2008.

Prescription, then, again began to run against the Taranto plaintiffs on May 24, 2008 — thirty days after notice was issued in the Chalona class action. When the Chalona and Buxton class actions were filed on August 25, 2006, those plaintiffs still had until September 1, 2007 to file claims. When prescription began to run against the Taranto plaintiffs again on May 24, 2008, they still had the remaining time to file suit that they would have had when the classes were filed (i.e., from August 25, 2006, to September 1, 2007). Therefore, the Court held that the Taranto plaintiffs had until May 31, 2009, to file suit and that they did so on June 27, 2008, well before the deadline. Therefore, Citizens’s exception remained overruled, and the plaintiffs could continue with their lawsuit.

That’s great for the Taranto plaintiffs, but what’s it mean for everyone else? The big takeaway is that, as long as there are pending class actions (or denied class members who haven’t been notified) against whatever insurer you’d like to sue, it’s not too late to file suit. For example, there are myriad class actions filed in the wake of Katrina that can support a would-be plaintiff. For example, as of July 2011, Orrill v. AIG, Inc. was still pending. Similarly, State v. AAA, et al. (Road Home Class Action) was filed by the state on behalf of all citizens effected by Katrina and has a sweeping class definition. Again, the class claims were still pending as of July 2011. There is also a consolidated class action before Judge Duval in the Eastern District of Louisiana with a sweeping class definition. Class certification was denied on June 16, 2009, but no notice has been issued to former putative class members, so arguably prescription has yet to begin running again.

So get to filing. It’s not too late.

In the opening pages of his exceptional book, Typography for Lawyers, Matthew Butterick reminds us that every producer — especially lawyers — should pay attention to his product’s design. But what do lawyers produce? Documents. Lots and lots of documents. But many lawyers don’t even know they should be thinking about document layout and design. Typography for Lawyers is where those lawyers should start.

For a long time, legal documents were produced on typewriters. Typewriters have a lot of limitations: one monospaced typeface, no italics, no small caps, etc. And over the years, the workarounds for those limitations became enshrined as custom in legal documents.

Think back: how many pleadings have you seen with a heading divided into two columns by asterisks, colons, or other symbols marching down the center of the page? Take this trainwreck, for example. And two spaces between sentences? Another vestigial rule from when typewriters ruled the earth. (Although some still wail and gnash their teeth when confronted with this assertion.)

Butterick wrote Typography for Lawyers for busy professionals, so no one has an excuse not to read it. His writing style is concise, pleasant to read, and makes an often dry technical subject accessible and memorable. Moreover, the book provides dozens of illustrative examples and is very well organized.

The meat of the book is organized under three major headings: type composition, text formatting, and page layout. And each heading is further divided into basic and advanced rules, with each rule getting its own entry in the table of contents for easy reference.

The type composition section covers the mechanics of using the most common (and commonly misused) characters, including both visible and whitespace characters. For example, Butterick explains the differences between curly quotation marks and straight quotation marks and shows his readers how turn smart quotation mark handling on and off in several popular word processing programs. The section also addresses less common marks like semicolons, colons, and the oft-abused hyphen. Then it transitions into the next section — all about formatting — with a description of ligatures and invisible characters like tabs, line breaks, and hard page breaks.

The next section lays out basic and advanced rules for text formatting. Underlining is out, as are goofy fonts, monospaced fonts and — if possible — system fonts. The advanced rules discuss more esoteric subjects like kerning, letterspacing, and hierarchical headings. Tucked in between this section and the next is an excellent visual comparison of fonts organized along the lines of “if you like this common font, try these similar but better ones” that I found very helpful.

The last big section gives readers the rules of print layout design. Of all the topics in the book, these are probably the least familiar to most readers. Butterick shows readers how to get the most out of their word processors. Setting automatic first-line indents, tweaking line spacing for readability, using advanced paragraph settings to control widow and orphan lines or to keep related lines together — all those topics and more are covered with specific instructions for several word processing programs. At first glance, it probably looks like voodoo to many lawyers (especially the older ones), but Butterick explains the different topics and methods clearly. (One day, I hope he’ll explain the black magic of spreadsheets to older lawyers. But that’s a topic for another book.)

And, finally, Butterick pulls it all together with a half-dozen or so before-and-after document examples. He shows transforms caption headings, motions, memos, and a few other types of documents from atrocious to pleasing and gives a step-by-step account of the changes. The finished documents are very good and are a great place to start when you inevitably get the urge to revise your form library.

Will Typography for Lawyers make you a professional typesetter? No. But will it make your documents look more professional? Absolutely. And if you find yourself wanting more, the book is an excellent jumping-off point for learning about design and typography in general. (I strongly recommend Thinking With Type, which is also listed in Butterick’s bibliography, as a primer on the subject.)

You should buy Typography for Lawyers, read it, and love it. It’s simply fantastic.