Here’s the Reply Brief in a case we’ve been following (naturally, because it is one of ours).

This is the case where the Court is reviewing the question of the amount of just compensation the county is obligated to provide, if any, for seizing the title to, and then auctioning off Pung’s property to satisfy his debt for unpaid property taxes. The county asserts Pung is entitled to only the proceeds, if any, from the auction (no matter what). Pung asserts he is entitled to just compensation, and that the lower court erroneously presumed that the auction proceeds met that standard.

Because this is one of ours, we won’t be posting much analysis. But here’s the Introduction to the Reply:

The Fifth Amendment does not require an auction; it requires payment of just compensation. And compensation for a taking cannot be “inadequate.” Jacobs v. United States, 290 U.S. 13, 16 (1933). Confusing a homeowner’s equity—the monetized equivalent of the interest in real property—with surplus proceeds inverts the Takings Clause and allows the government to improperly diminish the scope of the property interest taken by equating it to the results of a disposal process it alone controls. The proper inquiry is whether the auction price is adequate compensation for the equity taken, not whether an auction complied with state law.

When governments use a fair sale process, the resulting surplus proceeds may reflect just compensation for the excess equity taken (i.e., the part of the property’s value beyond the debt owed to the government). But sometimes it does not, and the Constitution does not allow the government to categorically deem “surplus proceeds” to be just compensation. The State may not define away the value of what it takes. Tyler v. Hennepin Cnty., 598 U.S. 631, 638 (2023).

Pung does not seek a rule that would make tax foreclosure or auction sales unworkable. Federal courts need not become appraisers or supervisors of tax auctions. The Takings Clause requires only the more modest calculation of just compensation that starts “based on … the property’s fair market value,” Pet. Br. i, minus the debt owed, and delivers an outcome that puts the property owner in as good a position as he was before the taking—nothing more; nothing less.

Reply at 1-2.

The Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on February 25, 2026, so stay tuned.

Follow along here, or on the Court’s docket.

Reply of Petitioner Michael Pung, Pung v. Isabella County, No. 25-95 (U.S. Feb. 10, 2026)