As the title should inform you, Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC v. 0.32 Acres of Land, No. 23-1935 (Jan. 27, 2025) is a federal taking. Here, a taking where a private pipeline condemnor is exercising the delegated federal power of eminent domain under the Natural Gas Act.
The issue we’re focusing on in this case is the district court’s exclusion of the property owner’s testimony about the value of her land. As you courtroom lawyers are keenly aware, a judge’s decision to allow or exclude evidence is, generally speaking, a discretionary matter and subject to the very deferential “abuse of discretion” standard of review on appeal.
But here, the Fourth Circuit concluded that the district court abused its discretion. Slip op. at 8. We won’t be going into great detail in this post, but instead urge you to review the opinion starting at page 8. “The threshold for admissibility of landowner testimony in takings cases is low.” Id. As long as there’s “a valid foundation” such as the owner’s personal knowledge of the land or knowledge of comparable sales, and as long as the testimony isn’t speculative or “pulled out of thin air with no basis whatsoever,” slip op. at 9, the court should let it in.
The Fourth Circuit also reversed the district court’s exclusion of an expert appraisal report, concluding that the district court again abused its discretion by too aggressively gatekeeping. The opinion cited a separate opinion in another case which the Fourth Circuit issued the same day, a case we cover in this post. The bottom line being here is that the district court stated, “[t]he gatekeeping role of the district court is particularly pronounced in condemnation proceedings.” Slip op. at 13.
To which the Fourth Circuit replied, in essence, no it’s not:
Here, rather than conducting a traditional analysis under Rule 702, the court stated that “[t]he gatekeeping role of the district court is particularly pronounced in condemnation proceedings under Rule 71.1.” 0.32 Acres of Land, 2022 WL 4091860, at *4. The court therefore identified contested factual issues in the Gruelle Report, disagreed with Gruelle’s view of those contested facts, and determined that these “errors and omissions” rendered the Report entirely inadmissible under the Rules of Evidence. Id. at *5. This was the wrong approach. “Rather, the court must first apply [the] Rules [of Evidence] to determine the universe of evidence that it will then use to ‘tr[y] all issues’ under Rule 71.1(h)(1).” 9.89 Acres, No. 23-2129, slip op. at 9. Thus, the correct inquiry at the admissibility stage is more modest than the one undertaken by the district court below: it should ask only whether the expert’s methodology was reliable and was based on sufficient facts or data, keeping in mind that the expert “need not be precisely informed about all details of the issues raised in order to offer an opinion.” Kopf v. Skyrm, 993 F.2d 374, 377 (4th Cir. 1993) (citation omitted).
Slip op. at 13.
Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC v. 0.32 Acres of Land, No. 23-1935 (4th Cir. Jan. 27, 2025)