42 U.S.C. § 1983 | Civil Rights

On Thursday, August 2, 2012, at 3:30 p.m., as part of the ABA Annual Meeting, the ABA and the State & Local Government Law Section is sponsoring a free screening of “ Crime After Crime,” the award-winning documentary from director Yoav Potash chronicling two San Francisco Bay Area land use lawyers who volunteer to provide their services to try and help free a woman who has been imprisoned for 20 years. We saw the film last year, and loved it. It was one of the best we have seen in a while:

“Crime” and “land use lawyers” are phrases not usually heard together; in most cases, the worlds of criminal law and land use never intersect, and lawyers for developers and property owners don’t have much occasion to visit the “Attorney’s Room” at the state pen. But in the documentary film Crime After Crime, two land use lawyers including our State and Local Government Law Section colleague Nadia Costa (Vice-Chair of the Section’s Land Use Committee), plunge into that unfamiliar milieu.

In 1983, Deborah Peagler, a woman brutally abused by her boyfriend, was sentenced to 25 years-to-life for her connection to his murder. Twenty years later, as she languished in prison, a California law allowing incarcerated domestic-violence survivors to reopen their cases was passed. Enter a pair of rookie land-use attorneys convinced that with the incontrovertible evidence that existed, they could free Deborah in a matter of months.

More details on the case here. Read my complete review here. Here are the details of the screening:

Location: DePaul University College of Law, 25 E. Jackson Blvd, Chicago, Room 241.

Cost: Free.

CLE Credits: Following the screening, we will be presenting a CLE on “The Cost of Wrongful Convictions” featuring Director Potash, Nadia Costa (one of the lawyers featured in “Crime After Crime”), Craig Watkins (District Attorney, Dallas), and Emily Miller (Better Government Association, Chicago). The panel will be moderated by our SLG Section colleague Donna Frazier.

Hope you can join us if you are attending the Annual Meeting, or are just in Chicago.
Continue Reading ABA Annual Meeting, Chicago: Free Screening Of “Crime After Crime”

This just in: in Leone v. County of Maui, No. 29696 (June 22, 2012), the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals held that a plaintiff alleging a regulatory taking is not required to seek an amendment to a Community Plan in order to ripen her claim. A CP amendment is a legislative act, and plaintiffs…

Every now and then, there’s a cert petition which those who generally support the petitioner’s side of the equation secretly hope is not granted, and breathe a sigh of relief when the Court denies review. Today, we’re sure that those on the regulatory side of the table are doing just that, because the Court declined…

Recently, in Intellectual Laziness on the Supreme Court, a short essay about the Supreme Court’s recent Equal Protection decision about unequal property assessments, Professor Richard Epstein wrote, “[i]t’s time to scrap the irrational ‘rational basis test.'” Decisions like the Ninth Circuit’s recent opinion in Samson v. City of Bainbridge Island, No. 10-35352…

Here’s the cert petition in a case we’ve been following that presents a question that has divided the lower courts – do the nexus and rough proportionality tests for whether a land use exaction works a taking apply to exactions of cash, or are they limited to land exactions? In St. Johns River Water Management …

This just in: the Ninth Circuit has issued an opinion in Kaahumanu v. State of Hawaii Dep’t of Land and Natural Resources, No. 10-15645 (June 6, 2012), the case challenging the State’s regulation of commercial weddings on state beaches under the First Amendment. The court mostly upheld the regulations, but struck down the…

The federal government has filed its invitation brief in Corboy v. Louie, No. 11-336 (cert. petition filed Sep. 15, 2011), the cert petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Hawaii Supreme Court’s dismissal of a challenge to the property tax exemptons conferred on lessees of Hawaiian Homesteads.

Only “native Hawaiians” are eligible…

Update: the latest in the latest Williamson County-related cert petition here.

—————————————————————————————————-

If you tried to explain the practical results of Williamson County‘s ripeness requirements to someone not familiar in the last 30 years of regulatory takings jurisprudence, they would probably think you were joking.

As we’ve explained many times, under Williamson…

Here is the final brief (the Plaintiffs’ reply to the Chief Election Officer and Reapportionment Commission’s Memorandum in Opposition to the Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction) in the federal court lawsuit challenging Hawaii’s use of “permanent resident” as its reapportionment population basis. Kostick v. Nago, No. 12-00184 (complaint filed Apr. 6, 2012).…