May 2019

Here’s one we’ve been waiting to drop for a while, on an issue we wrote about earlier this week.

In Puntenney v. Iowa Utilities Board, No. 17-0423 (May 31, 2019), the Iowa Supreme Court — taking a different view than Kentucky — held that a pipeline which runs through Iowa, but which

Inverse_excerpt

There’s a lot to digest in the draft workgroup reports of the California Commission on Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery, which were released yesterday.

But the bottom line stands out: California’s version of inverse condemnation liability — which holds a private utility liable for just compensation and damages if its activity was a cause

An issue we’ve been tracking for a while — are takings for pipelines for the public’s benefit? — raises another question: how is “the public” defined?

Some courts, like Kentucky’s, define the public as the public which the jurisdiction serves. In the Bluegrass Pipeline case, for

This morning, the Supreme Court declined to review a case we’ve been following, Like v. Transcontiental Gas Pipe Line Co., No. 18-1206. 

This is the one in which landowners are challenging the district court’s issuance of an injunction in a Natural Gas Act taking which allow a private condemnor to obtain immediate possession of

In Keeton v. State of Alaska, No. 7366 (May 24, 2019), the Alaska Supreme Court held that a property owner is entitled to interest only on the “amount awarded” — the difference between the quick-take deposit and the eventual final judgment of compensation — and not on that amount plus the statutory attorneys’ fees

With the opinion in the Knick v. Township of Scott case to drop as soon as Tuesday (we’re guessing the opinion will be by Chief Justice Roberts, by the way), hold on: we’re about to get super nerdy here. Impossibly nerdy. Yes, we’re revisiting the Star Trek analogies. We’ve been down this road before

Chicago wants to know where the food trucks it licenses to operate on city streets are. So it conditions the approval of a license on the operator installing a GPS device on the vehicle. 

In LMP Services, Inc. v. City of Chicago, No. 123123 (May 23, 2019), a case decided by the Illinois Supreme

In City of Dublin v. RiverPark Group, LLC, No. 18AP-607 (May 9, 2019), the Ohio Court of Appeals (Tenth District), the city exercised eminent domain — via Ohio’s version of “quick take” (immediate possession, not title) — to take an easement “for the purposes of constructing roadway improvements … and a shared-use path adjacent

Short answer: no.

But the longer answer which lawprof Ilya Somin discusses in this short podcast is worth listening to. Check it out. 

Here’s the summary:

Over the last few years, taxi companies in several cities have brought lawsuits claiming that legalizing ride-share services such as Uber and Lyft violates the Takings Clause of the

North Dakota, as you might expect, can be cold in the winter. So cold that railroad switches need to be heated, else they get… frozen. The railroad uses refillable propane tanks, but these need to be refilled from time to time. And North Dakota is so cold in the winter that sometimes, the propane trucks