Today’s American Banker has a story on the latest development in the let’s-use-eminent-domain-to-take-underwater-mortgages scheme: the Federal Housing Finance Agency has sent a strong shot across the bow of local governments contemplating such a move (e.g., San Bernadino, Chicago, even Berkeley):
Uh, don’t.
Full statement here, or below. The American Banker story
Check this out, our latest law-related fun project.
Our firm is sponsoring (along with the Honolulu Museum of Art) a legal film series in September. We’re showing six legal films: Crime After Crime, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Castle (for that eminent domain connection, naturally), Counsellor at Law, and Anatomy of
For those of you sticking around Chicago after the ABA Annual Meeting, there’s the opportunity for even more land use, zoning, takings, and condemnation programming. ALI-CLE (fka ALI-ABA) is putting on it’s annual Land Use Institute later this week. It looks like Planning Co-Chairs Gideon Kanner and Frank Schnidman have put together a wide-ranging
This past week was the ABA Annual Meeting in Chicago. These things can often be endurance contests where you’re rushing from one meeting to another (is this the Executive Committee meeting or the Council meeting?), and it’s often hard to tell the players without a scorecard.
Sprinkled among these unexciting-but-productive sessions are the real meat
Here are the cases and links that I discussed at today’s ABA session on eminent domain:
The ABA Journal reports on yesterday’s screening of Crime After Crime: Tears Flow at Screening of Film on Pro Bono Fight to Free Woman Convicted of Her Abuser’s Murder.
We are at the ABA Annual meeting this week, so don’t have a lot of time to keep up a long-distance practice and write up comprehensive blog posts, so we’re going to keep it short.
Here’s the latest takings decision from the Federal Circuit in a case we’ve been following, Estate of Hage v. United States
The “Blawg of the Day” at Inter Alia, that’s what. Thanks to legal tech guru Tom Mighell for the notice.
On Thursday, August 2, 2012, at 3:30 p.m., as part of the ABA Annual Meeting, the ABA and the State & Local Government Law Section is sponsoring a free screening of “ Crime After Crime,” the award-winning documentary from director Yoav Potash chronicling two San Francisco Bay Area land use lawyers who volunteer to provide their services to try and help free a woman who has been imprisoned for 20 years. We saw the film last year, and loved it. It was one of the best we have seen in a while:
“Crime” and “land use lawyers” are phrases not usually heard together; in most cases, the worlds of criminal law and land use never intersect, and lawyers for developers and property owners don’t have much occasion to visit the “Attorney’s Room” at the state pen. But in the documentary film Crime After Crime, two land use lawyers including our State and Local Government Law Section colleague Nadia Costa (Vice-Chair of the Section’s Land Use Committee), plunge into that unfamiliar milieu.
In 1983, Deborah Peagler, a woman brutally abused by her boyfriend, was sentenced to 25 years-to-life for her connection to his murder. Twenty years later, as she languished in prison, a California law allowing incarcerated domestic-violence survivors to reopen their cases was passed. Enter a pair of rookie land-use attorneys convinced that with the incontrovertible evidence that existed, they could free Deborah in a matter of months.
More details on the case here. Read my complete review here. Here are the details of the screening:
Location: DePaul University College of Law, 25 E. Jackson Blvd, Chicago, Room 241.
Cost: Free.
CLE Credits: Following the screening, we will be presenting a CLE on “The Cost of Wrongful Convictions” featuring Director Potash, Nadia Costa (one of the lawyers featured in “Crime After Crime”), Craig Watkins (District Attorney, Dallas), and Emily Miller (Better Government Association, Chicago). The panel will be moderated by our SLG Section colleague Donna Frazier.
Hope you can join us if you are attending the Annual Meeting, or are just in Chicago.
Continue Reading ABA Annual Meeting, Chicago: Free Screening Of “Crime After Crime”
In a case that was probably doomed from the start because of an earlier precedential ruling, the Federal Circuit concluded that the government’s temporary seizure of the plaintiff’s computer “for review” at a border stop and the subsequent destruction of the computer hard drive and resulting loss of data was not a taking because