May 2021

Screenshot_2021-05-15 18th Annual Brigham-Kanner Prize Recipient

Mark your calendars for September 30 – October 1, 2021, and join us at the William and Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia for the 18th Annual Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference. It’s planned to be in-person, so when we mean “join us” we really mean join us.

This year the Conference will recognize the lifetime

You might think that a statute the legislature adopted to allow more recovery than under constitutional takings law, that requires the DOT to pay landowners whose lands abut a change-of-grade project for the value of “any damages to said lands occasioned by such change of grade,” would include the situation where the DOT converted a

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A private pipeline did what pipelines often do: it started negotiating with property owners for the property needed, but at the same time pressed forward. It reached agreement with some owners, others not. It filed “expropriation” lawsuits (for it is in Louisiana that our scene lies). It started to build, even before judgments of expropriation.

67-day bench trial. 84-page decision. Check out the Superior Court’s Tentative Statement of Decision in a case in which a property owner has successfully challenged the Town of Apple Valley’s attempt to take a private water company so the Town could operate it itself.

There’s a lot going on, and to understand the decision you

Check out the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit’s opinion in Harrison v. Montgomery County, No. 20-4-51 (May 11, 2021). It’s short, readable. And, most importantly, involves a subject that’s near and dear: takings, and the myriad potential traps that await an unsuspecting property owner making such a claim.

If you’ve ever

OK, we get that law is a serious business and that one should never make light of others’ situations. Each person’s claim is important to them, at the very least.

But after reading today’s Federal Circuit opinion (unpublished, nonprecedential) in Bench Creek Ranch, LLC v. United States, No. 20-2151 (May 7, 2021), we couldn’t

We’re hoping that someone can explain the Florida District Court of Appeal’s recent opinion in Bondar v. Town of Jupiter Inlet Colony, No. 4D19-2118 (May 5, 2021) in a way that makes sense other than the old apocryphal tale of “I don’t know why we do things this way, except that we’ve always done

R.S. Radford’s most-recent article, Knick and the Elephant in the Courtroom: Who Cares Least About Property Rights? in the latest issue of the Texas A&M Journal of Property Law, should be next on your to-read list. 

Here’s the summary of the article:

Throughout the thirty-four-year history of Williamson County, one fact was taken for