In State ex rel. Boggs v. City of Cleveland, No. 2025-Ohio-5094 (Nov. 13, 2025), the Ohio Supreme Court held that the City of Cleveland could be liable for inversely condemning land, even though that land is not in the City of Cleveland.

The city claimed that in order to be liable for inverse condemnation, it must have the authority to take the property by eminent domain. And under Ohio law, the state has only delegated to the city the power to take by eminent domain property that is within the city’s geographic boundaries. Therefore, the city argued, if we can’t affirmatively take the plaintiff’s land, we can’t be liable for inversely condemning it.

The case involves the Cleveland airport. As part of its runway expansion, airplanes would fly over adjacent properties (obviously), including properties outside the city’s jurisdiction. The city was authorized to purchase avigation easements on some of these properties, which it did. But Boggs, the plaintiff here, refused to sell. Later, when the noise, vibration, and fuel debris became too much to bear, the owner sued for inverse condemnation.

The case bounced back and forth between state and federal court, eventually ending up in state court. The lower courts held that Boggs lacked standing, concluding that Cleveland “lacks authority to appropriate property outside its boundaries absent specific statutory authorization.” Slip op. at 5. “Because it determined that no statute authorized Cleveland to appropriate Boggs’s property, the trial court held that Boggs’s lawsuit was not redressable by a writ of mandamus.” Id. (Recall that in Ohio, one does not sue for just compensation in “inverse condemnation,” but instead seeks a writ of mandamus to compel the defendant to institute an eminent domain action.)

The Supreme Court reversed, framing the issue thusly:

Is a property owner entitled to compensation when a municipal government has taken her property even if she doesn’t live in the municipality that has done the taking?

Slip op. at 7.

The court noted that Boggs was put in a bind:

{¶ 19} The decision below was grounded in this court’s precedent. But it leaves Boggs—and others in her situation—in a conundrum. On the one hand, the Ohio Constitution guarantees compensation to a property owner who has had land taken for a public use. And there is nothing in the constitutional guarantee that limits this right when the property is taken by a different municipality than the one in which the property is located. But when the property owner doesn’t live in the municipality that takes the property, under the logic of the court of appeals, there are no means available for that property owner to secure the just compensation guaranteed by the Ohio Constitution.

{¶ 20} In other words, the court of appeals put the following four principles of law together and came out at a dead end: (1) the Ohio Constitution guarantees a right to just compensation when private property is taken for a public use, (2) the way to secure that compensation is by instituting a mandamus action to force a municipality to institute appropriation proceedings, (3) but a municipality cannot institute proceedings to appropriate property outside its boundaries, (4) so when a municipality does take property outside its boundaries, there is no way for a landowner to secure just compensation.

Id.

The court concluded that the compensation requirement of the Ohio Constitution is “self executing.” Slip op. at 8 (“We have never directly addressed whether the compensation requirement of Article I, Section 19 is self-executing. But it easily falls within our understanding of a self-executing provision.”). The federal courts would be well to pay attention to the Ohio court’s analysis:

By this standard, Article I, Section 19 is plainly self-executing: the provision requires compensation when property is taken for public use, it outlines a specific procedural method (a jury trial) by which compensation is to be ascertained, and it contains no language indicating that its enforcement depends on legislative action. See also Knick v. Scott, Pennsylvania, 588 U.S. 180, 192 (2019) (“Because of ‘the self-executing character’ of the Takings Clause [of the federal Constitution] ‘with respect to compensation,’ a property owner has a constitutional claim for just compensation at the time of the taking.” [Cleaned up.]).

Slip op. at 10. In short, if property is taken, there must be a remedy.

The outcome here may also be understood under municipal law principles. After all the City of Cleveland merely exercises the state’s sovereign power of eminent domain, via a delegation from the State of Ohio, and the state has not delegated to the city the power to expropriate property beyond its geographic boundaries. The court noted that this case presents a circumstance where the self-executing principle “runs up” against this limited delegation:

{¶ 36} So far we have outlined two constitutional principles: (1) if property is taken for a public use, the government must pay just compensation, and (2) municipalities do not have the authority to exercise eminent domain outside their boundaries. Now, we consider what happens when those principles run up against each other. What happens when a municipal government takes property beyond its boundaries and fails to pay just compensation?

Slip op. at 14.

The court held that the resolution of this conflict is “straightforward.” Slip op. at 16. The self-executing constitution principle is very clear, and cannot be limited by the scope of a municipality’s delegated eminent domain authority:

{¶ 44} We disagree [with the lower courts]. The principle that a municipality cannot use the power of eminent domain beyond its borders should not mean that a municipality does not have to follow the Constitution’s command to pay just “compensation” when its actions effect an extraterritorial taking of property.

Slip op. at 17.

The court held that since this is not Cleveland formally exercising its limited eminent domain power, there’s really not a conflict between the self-executing principle and the city’s limited home rule power. Slip op. at 18 (“Indeed, by definition, an inverse-condemnation action—such as the one presented here—is “‘a cause of action against the government to recover the value of property taken by the government without formal exercise of the power of eminent domain[.]’”) (citation omitted). The compensation remedy is guaranteed when a local government takes property, and that’s that.

The opinion is worth reading in its entirety. And, as we noted above, we wish the federal courts (and a certain high court located in Washington, D.C.) would take a gander.

State ex rel. Boggs v. City of Cleveland, No. 2025-Ohio-5094 (Ohio Nov. 13, 2025)