September 2020

We were honored to be a guest on an episode of the Pendulum Land Podcast. Here’s the description from the show notes:

Hawaii inverse condemnation lawyer and William and Mary Law School adjunct professor Rob Thomas joins your hosts to discuss recording his classic single “Smooth” with Carlos Santana, whether the COVID moratoriums on

Here’s the latest development in a case out of Maryland that we’ve been following for a while.

This is the one where Maryland Reclamation Association bought land back in 1990 to operate a rubble landfill. But after the purchase, the County changed its regs to prohibit (guess what) … rubble landfills. Mesne litigation ensued

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Although it is set to launch this Friday, October 2, 2020, there’s still more than enough time to register (and room at the inn) for you to join us for the 17th Annual Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference at the William and Mary Law School.

Like everything else this season, the Conference is online (

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Today, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering our cert petition during the Court’s “long conference.”

This is the case focusing on the interplay between Williamson County‘s “final decision” ripeness rule and the “case and controversy” injury-in-fact standing requirement, and asks: if the government makes its final decision, but the plaintiff isn’t injured until

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The plaintiff owned property down in the land of the Delta Blues. The intersection of Highways 61 and 361 in Coahoma County, Mississippi. That’s a pic of the courthouse, taken a few years ago, by the way (yeah, we went there). 

The owner tried several businesses there, first a blues club, then another club

What place do you think of when you hear the word “earthquake? Most likely California, we’re betting.

And it’s also very likely that you didn’t think “Ohio.”

Well, that’s probably what everyone involved in the Ohio Supreme Court case State ex rel. AWMS Water Solutions, LLC v. Mertz, No. 2019-0493 (Sep. 23, 2020) thought

Well, that didn’t take long: as we surmised back when the CDC first issued its order halting residential evictions until the end of the year due to COVID (see “How Can? U.S. DHS: National Eviction Moratorium (Roscoe Filburn Could Not Be Reached For Comment),” the order has resulted in a complaint in

A very quick one today from the North Dakota Supreme Court. In Cass County Joint Water Resource District v. Aaland, No. 20200272 (Sep. 15, 2020), the court rejected a property owner’s request for a stay pending appeal of a trial court’s order allowing the district to enter the owner’s property “to conduct examinations, surveys