42 U.S.C. § 1983 | Civil Rights

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I’m not going to do an in-depth preview of tomorrow’s Supreme Court oral arguments in Knick v. Township of Scott, No. 17-647 for several reasons.

First, a lot of others have summarized the issues already, far better than I can. See the list below.

Second, I filed an amicus brief in the case in

Our colleague and co-planning chair Joe Waldo was in town yesterday, so we walked through historic Williamsburg, Virginia (cradle of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights), to invite you to join us for the 36th Annual ALI-CLE Eminent Domain & Land Valuation Litigation Conference (January 24-26, 2019, in Palm Springs, California).

As we wrote

Before last week’s Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Brent Kavanaugh to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, we wrote that the issue of property rights and eminent domain may come up during the hearing, even though Judge Kavanaugh’s actual judicial record on that topic is pretty thin. 

We were busy during

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You’ve known for a while that Palm Springs, California, specifically the Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel (a resort facility, but right in town, so you will have many options for “off campus” activities like art museums, the aerial tram, golf, and whatever suits your fancy, and close-in to the Palm Springs Airport), is the venue

A quick one today because we’re offline (more on that later). Pacific Legal Foundation (the folks who are representing the property owner in the pending case challenging the continuing viability of the Williamson County ripeness doctrine), has posted this entry on their blog, “This monkey got his day in court. Property owners still

Kearney had her property taken. The school district doing the taking said it wanted to put a septic system on the property, and so commissioned a percolation study. But then it decided that instead, it would connect to a sewer system. The state court jury believed neither side’s appraiser completely, rejecting both Kearney’s appraisal ($1.4

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One of our last acts as Chair of the ABA’s Section of State and Local Government Law was to green light a CLE program at the recent Chicago annual meeting entitled “State Attorneys General and Federalism in the Obama and Trump Eras.”

The title kind of gives it away, but the main topic

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Here are the cases and other items I either spoke about or mentioned at today’s Transportation Research Board‘s 57th Annual Workshop on Transportation Law in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

A short, but published, opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

In Archbold-Garrett v. New Orleans, No. 17-30692 (June 22, 2018), the court held that the plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, and Fourteenth Amendment claims (search and seizure, compensation, and procedural due process) were ripe for federal court, even though

This one is more for our muni law friends, but today’s post also has two eminent domain angles. 

Anyone who has been to a city council meeting knows at least one fellow like this, considered a pain-in-the-butt by officials. A gadfly, who testifies on seemingly every issue. This is Fane Lozman, eminent domain protester