A piece from noted eminent domain scholar Professor Ilya Somin, “Beware misguided ‘mainstream’ legal thought – ‘Kelo v. City of New London’ in perspective” at the Washington Post.
The thrust of his piece (and a forthcoming law review article) is that Kelo isn’t some nutty decision, but was the product of “mainstream legal thought gone off the rails.” Comparing it to Plessy, Korematsu, Buck v. Bell, and Dred Scott, Professor Somin writes:
earlier precedents holding that almost anything can be a public use justifying the taking of property – precedents that ended up authorizing the forcible displacement of hundreds of thousands of people (most of them poor and politically weak). For the most part, the justices who voted for these decisions were not rogue extremists, but respected members of the legal establishment relying on mainstream reasoning and habits of thought.
A truly extreme, non-mainstream ruling is less likely to cause harm than a bad decision that comes about because the mainstream itself has gone bad. The former is unlikely to become widely accepted and more likely to quickly be overruled or limited in its impact.
We recommend you read the entire piece and his upcoming article.