What You Should Know About Pa.'s Construction Notices Directory

Oftentimes these days, when I open my connection to the internet, I am confronted with nearly a dozen headlines telling me the 10 things I need to know before working out, going to sleep, and, heavens forbid, walking into a nearby fast food restaurant (not to mention the adjacent headline telling me NEVER to walk into a fast food restaurant ever again, lest I break the seal of the scroll foretelling my early demise). These are the images that began to form in my mind as I sat down to consider what to write about the latest endeavor of our commonwealth’s legislature to incorporate yet another “fix” to the now 50-something-year-old Mechanics’ Lien Law of 1963, 49 P.S. Sections 1101-1902, as amended (the Lien Law), which as a colleague of mine once remarked is right next to “mental health” in the Purdon’s volume containing this part of Pennsylvania’s statutory law (and perhaps with good reason, given the brain-teasing nature of this particular statute).

You see, there is a necessary humor that must be conjured among those who ply their trade, with any frequency, in the “dark arts” of mechanics’ liens. Whatever the task, but particularly when pursuing a claim of mechanics’ lien, there is the sense on the horizon that one false step may spell doom. That is somewhat a function of the case law that has developed outside of the penumbra of the ominously Stygian shadow cast by this dastardly device of prejudgment attachment. For most of its life in the current iteration, the courts interpreted the Lien Law as a statute in derogation of the common law that must be strictly and narrowly construed when assessing whether a lien claim will survive a challenge. There was an ever so brief dalliance by the Superior Court of Pennsylvania with a liberal construction approach in what has become to be well known to lien law practitioners as simply “Bricklayers.” However, more recently, even the Superior Court has returned to the fold of ol’, restating the derogation of the common law/strict and narrow construction mantra with the almost rote precision that lien lawyers grew to find comforting, and a bit too taken for granted, until the Superior Court veered off this standard course with Bricklayers.