Do You Need an Anthropologist to Read a Quit Claim Deed?

Perhaps in Oregon You Do

Surprisingly, a recorded deed of title may not be proof of ownership to real property in Oregon
depending, among other things, on the cultural idiosyncrasies of the transferor and transferee as
disclosed by the expert testimony of an anthropologist. At least thats the upshot of the recent
holding by the Oregon Court of Appeals in Hughes v. Ephrem, 275 Or. App. 477 (2015).
In Hughes the plaintiff obtained a judgment against its debtor and had judicially foreclosed its
lien against the residential real property its debtor owned by sheriffs sale. The creditor then
sought to evict its debtors mother who resided in that home. The debtors parents had
transferred title to the debtors home through a quit claim deed without any apparent reservation
of rights. In other words, the debtors parents didnt explicitly reserve a life estate or any other
interest in that property when they transferred it to their daughter, the judgment debtor.
Yet neither the trial court nor the Court of Appeals held that the creditor could evict the debtors
mother who occupied the home. Instead, the Court of Appeals said that there was still a factual
issue of whether the debtors mother had intended to reserve a right to continue living in the
home when she quit claimed title to her daughter.
Both the debtor and her mother were Romani. Both the trial court and Court of Appeals found
their ethnicity significant for some unexplained reason. In fact, the trial court had actually
received testimony from an anthropologist about Romani culture before concluding that the
mother was not subject to eviction. Theres no indication that the quit claim deed was written in
any language other than English or that there was any ambiguity in the words of the quit claim
deed itself.
Ultimately, the Court of Appeals sent the case back to the trial court to determine whether the
debtors parents had really intended to retain an undisclosed life estate in the property or
whether, perhaps, the property had been transferred to the debtor in order to avoid several tax
liens and other debts the mother owed.
Neither the trial court nor the Court of Appeals showed any respect for the virtues of certainty,
predictability and judicial efficiency in reaching their outcomes in this case. Instead, the Court
of Appeals in Hughes fumbled about to convert what should have been an objectively obvious
outcome into a judicial guess about the grantors past state of mind. A quick reading of the quit
claim deed alone should have been sufficient to resolve the case. But in the hands of these
courts, the case became a psychological mystery. Meanwhile, both courts ignored the steadily
increasing costs imposed on the innocent creditor who simply sought payment for its debt from
assets which the public records showed the debtor owned.
2/1/2016 Lawrence B. Hunt of Hunt & Associates, P.C. All rights reserved.