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Robert H. Thomas

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Reading through the opinion of the Supreme Court of the Philippines in City of Manila v. Roces Prieto, No. 221366 (Aug. 29, 2019), there is a lot there that will look familiar to U.S. lawyers, specifically U.S. eminent domain lawyers.

Viz.: It is up before the Court on a petition for certiorari, there

If you didn’t know takings, and just had to venture guess whether a court would ever conclude that the outlawing of “bump stocks” (a device which attaches to a semi-automatic rifle and makes it cycle really quickly so that it works somewhat like a fully-automatic rifle) was a taking, what would you say?

Last week, along with Bob Grace, I (Robert (don’t-call-me-Bob) Thomas), was a guest on Clint Schumacher’s Eminent Domain Podcast. Stream it above, or download it here.

Clint and I had a wide-ranging discussion that centered on the recent trend of limiting short-term rentals, the legal pushback, and (of course) takings. We discussed

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Chief Justice Marshall (L) and Professor Wythe (R) request the pleasure of your company at the 16th Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference at the William & Mary Law School, in Williamsburg, Virginia, Thursday and Friday, October 3-4, 2019. Register here, and make your plans to join us. 

The Conference’s main event is the awarding of

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Here’s the amici brief we are filing today in support of the Petitioner in a case we’ve been following, Smyth v. Conservation Comm’n of Falmouth, No. 19-223 (cert. petition filed Aug. 20, 2019). 

The Massachusetts Court of Appeals held that a judge, not a jury, determines Penn Central takings questions, and that the

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Takings mavens know lawprof Ilya Somin. Among other things, he’s authored some of the more interesting and useful scholarship in our field.

Here’s his latest, published in the 2019 Cato Supreme Court Review, about the Supreme Court’s latest takings case, Knick v. Township of Scott

We naturally recommend you read the entirety

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Today’s post is kind of long, but we think the opinion is well worth your time. 

NGA Preliminary Injunctions

Regular readers know that we’ve made no secret of our disapproval of the prevailing practice in federal courts of using preliminary injunctions to allow private for-profit pipelines to grab immediate pre-condemnation possession of property using the

A great result for colleague Carolyn Elefant, who represents property owners in a case and issue we’ve been following

This is one of those Natural Gas Act pipeline cases. Not on the issue of immediate-possession-by-injunction (we’ll have the latest development in that chapter very soon), but on the administrative law side, involving FERC’s