Talk:Mechanic's lien

Apostrophe needed in title
"Mechanics lien" wants an apostrophe. I don't like to say I'm right and everybody else is wrong, but in any reasonably standard English the possessive case does require an apostrophe. For example, Revised Code of Washington Chapter 60.04 is entitled "Mechanics' and Materialmen's Liens" with correct use of the apostrophe for the plural possessive cases of "mechanic" and "materialman." The fact that a certain spelling appears on a document filed in court somewhere does not make it correct English; it just means it probably passed Microsoft's spellchecker. There was a time when legislators, lawyers, and judges cared about the correct and eloquent use of language, when they considered it essential to their legal arguments and prescriptions, and even argued over the fine points of the phraseology of this or that law, but that time is long past. The current general standard of poorly worded, gratuitously verbose, and decidedly ineloquent statutory law (the example from RCW notwithstanding) has a way of making lawyers rich and facilitating legislation from the bench.

Please move this article back to "Mechanic's lien" or to "Mechanics' and materialmen's liens" or even the rather banal "Construction lien." 130.94.162.64 07:00, 9 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Construction Lien is not "banal" - it's accurate and accords with common English. I bet that most laypeople and even some lawyers would misunderstand the expression "mechanics' lien" and assume that it applies to a tradesperson who fixes engines. That's why in Ontario, for example, the staute was renamed the Construction Lien Act in 1983. User:70.24.109.9 04:30, 20 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Moved article per punctuation change. --Legis (talk - contribs) 16:40, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Draft Article
In response to the need for expert attention tag, I'm proposing to substitute the following draft article for the current one. It uses some of the current article but it has been fairly completely reorganized and substantially expanded. If there is no significant negative commentary within the next two weeks, I'll make the substitution.Anoneditor 03:01, 12 February 2007 (UTC)


 * (Removed draft copy that was moved to mainspace) Flowanda | Talk 22:11, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Substituted draft article
As there was no commentary within the last two weeks, I substituted the above draft article for the existing one and removed the needs-an-expert tag. References for the article will be forthcoming soon. Anoneditor 22:05, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Reasons for existence
The second, third and fifth sentences of the prior revision have been deleted because they are irrelevant to the reason for the existence of these liens. The sixth sentence has been deleted because the "public policy" argument it propounds is misleading; the assumption against gratuity runs through all of the law of commerce and is not in any way specific to the mechanic's lien laws. Anoneditor 01:02, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Vehicular Liens
This article deals primarily with mechanic's liens (AKA construction liens); the section on garage liens, and the external link to Automotive Service Assn (link actually goes nowhere), are out of place on this page. But I wanted to open it up for discussion before deleting. Perhaps this article should be re-worked into 2 sections, one for the more accepted "mechanic's lien" as a construction lien or materialman's lien, and one for garage liens...or perhaps there should be two separate articles. Amazanne (talk) 03:22, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

US-Centric
This article appears to be almost entirely US-centric, although a mention is made of English Law. Wimboman (talk) 22:25, 21 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I added what I could find on mechanic's liens outside the U.S. There doesn't seem to be much literature on the subject. I'm not saying it's the case here, but complaints of US-Centricism are often misplaced, since there sometimes just isn't much to say otherwise, or at least no one who wants to research or write about it.  Even what I've written here is probably going to serve primarily as a distraction to 99.99% of readers. John2510 (talk) 14:14, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

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