If someone were to borrow a cup of sugar to make a cake and doesn’t return a similar amount, is the lender entitled to the cake? The lender would be viewed as excessively greedy to acquire so much in recompense. A fairer outcome would be for the borrower to offer a slice deemed equivalent to the value of the sugar. Yet, prior to the Supreme Court Ruling for Tyler v. Hennepin County in May 2023, governments were allowed to “take the cake” from many citizens through an unfair scheme commonly referred to as home equity theft.