Appellate law

They’re going back, to reargue the case with a full contingent of justices. In the January oral argument calendar published yesterday, the Supreme Court gave us the date and time: 

Wednesday, January 16, 2019, at 10:00 a.m.

We will be there, and will bring you our thoughts.  

Supreme Court Argument Calendar January 2019 

A unanimous opinion from the Supreme Court, which can only mean one thing: a narrowly-drawn opinion that doesn’t resolve much.

But we’re grateful anyway, because the opinion is one that appreciates the plight of property owners whose land is subject to being designated as “critical habitat” under the Endangered Species Act.

Intervenor Center for Biological

Get ready. In this and upcoming posts, we’re going to be featuring the items on our agenda for the upcoming ALI-CLE Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Litigation Conference, January 24-26, 2019, in sunny Palm Springs, California. 

ALI-CLE has released the brochure, which those of you on the mailing list should have received —

In the middle of the terrible news from the latest wildfires to hit California comes this order from the California Court of Appeal, Fourth District, declining to issue a writ to review the California Public Utilities Commission’s rejection of SDG&E’s request for a rate increase to cover the costs of settling inverse condemnation claims

Here’s the amicus motion and proposed brief we filed yesterday in a Third Circuit case we’ve been following, and which we wrote about recently.

In the few short days since that post, the owners are now also represented by the Institute for Justice, and have filed a petition for rehearing and rehearing en banc

Retroactive continuity — or “retconning” — is, according to that authoritative source Wikipedia, a “literary device in which established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity.”

For example, compare the real-world explanation for why the 1960’s Star Trek show’s Klingons didn’t have

Here’s the motion for leave and proposed brief amici curiae we filed yesterday in an appeal pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. 

This is a pipeline case (another one!) involving land in Florida. The district court got it right, concluding that the property owner/condemnee was entitled to recover

An observation: courts seem to believe that in eminent domain, a taking, once it is instituted, is inevitable. Thus, the landowner should simply go with the flow, because this is going to happen. We get where that comes from. After all, most takings are completed and the property is acquired. But it isn’t necessarily so. As

Knickrehearing

As we guessed immediately after arguments, today in this order the Supreme Court has set the Knick v. Township of Scott case for supplemental briefing, and reargument. 

Here’s the full text of the order:

This case is restored to the calendar for reargument. The parties and the Solicitor General are directed to file letter

Pipelines are a hot topic. So much so that we’re devoting a couple of sessions at the upcoming ALI-CLE Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Litigation Conference to the subject (“Where You Haven’t Gone Before: New Approaches to Challenging the Take,” and “Compensation Pitfalls: How to Avoid Problems,” for example). 

And, with