This morning, I joined my Owners’ Counsel colleagues Leslie Fields and Joe Waldo (the programming co-chairs), and more than 100 fellow eminent domain experts in New Orleans under the auspices of ALI-CLE at our annual gathering for the start of 2 1/2 days of legal education.
Joe and Leslie asked me to join Professor James
Next week, we’ll be in New Orleans for the 2014 edition of the ALI-CLE Eminent Domain program, now in its 31st year.
As usual, my Owners’ Counsel colleagues Leslie Fields and Joe Waldo (the programming co-chairs) have put together a fantastic 2.5 day of programming, taught by expert faculty. At 11:00 a.m. on
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review an interesting case we’ve been following, about that big glass viewing platform over the Grand Canyon.
As we noted here, in Grand Canyon Skywalk Development, LLC v. Sa Nyu Wa, Inc., 715 F.3d 1196 (9th Cir. Apr. 26, 2013), the issues mostly involve
The Urban Lawyer, the law review produced by the ABA Section of State & Local Goverment Law has published an article which we wrote with our Damon Key colleagues Mark Murakami and Bethany Ace, Recent Developments in Eminent Domain: Public Use, 45 Urban Lawyer 809 (2013).
Here’s the Introduction to the article:
Homes. Tiny homes. Things have come full circle. Because according to this report from The Day, New London’s daily paper (“Take the steps to pursue Fort Trumbull dreams“), the city’s mayor, in order to remove the “stain” of the l’affiare Kelo, has proposed a “tiny house neighborhood” on the leftover
Be sure to check out this interview with a person we’re proud to call a friend and a colleague, Gideon Kanner, in the most recent edition of Right of Way magazine, a publication of the International Right of Way Association.
“A Fierce Advocate for Just Compensation” is a sitdown with Professor Kanner, and covers a lot of ground, so to speak. The entire piece is worth reading, but here’s what a colleague pointed out as perhaps the best part:
If you represent a property owner in an eminent domain case, particularly an inverse condemnation one, you must understand that your client is persona non grata or the law’s “poor relation,” as U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist once said. The California Supreme Court once stated in an opinion that it was its duty to keep condemnation awards down, which is a hell of a hurdle to overcome when your task is to persuade the Justices that your client was undercompensated by the court below. So in those not-so-good ol’ days of the 1960s, when I walked into court, I had my job cut out for me. Sometimes, the hostility emanating from the bench was palpable. As Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit once noted, what property owners in this field often get from the bench is “thinly-disguised contempt.” This is not a line of work for the faint of heart.
According to this story (“Eminent domain panel values Flight 93 crash site at $1.5 million“), a three-person panel of commissioners appointed by the U.S. District Court has settled on the amount of compensation owed the landowner for the taking of the site in middle Pennsylvania where United 93 crashed on September 11, 2001.
The latest front has opened in the ongoing (and spreading) issue about Mortgage Resolution Partners’ efforts to convince municipalities to use their powers of eminent domain to take underwater mortgages.
Here’s the Complaint, filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Nothern District of California, which seeks public disclosure by the Federal Housing
No one contests that when it condemned property in Norfolk, Virginia to expand the Federal courthouse, the federal government made unreasonable pretrial offers to the property owner. The owner’s appraisals valued the property at $36.1 and $30.7 million, but the government valuation resulted in a $6.175 pretrial offer. After the pretrial dance, the final offers