Eminent Domain | Condemnation

According to this story (“Eminent Domain and a Horse Slaugherhouse at Wounded Knee?“) the Oglala Lakota Nation has decided to condemn land on the reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota to prevent its sale by its current (non-Indian) owner to third parties. The Wounded Knee site is significant for at least two reasons…

Update: Professor Ilya Somin, a leading eminent domain scholar and author of the definitive articles on post-Kelo reforms, adds his thoughts on the decision here. Here’s a report from the local paper.

————————-

In the wake of Kelo v. New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), a majority of states adopted rules about…

What we’re reading today:

…

Here’s one as cliché as beach cases from Hawaii: an opinion from a Texas court about the meaning of the term “crude petroleum” in the Texas Natural Resource Code. Oil that is. Black gold. Texas Tea. 

It’s also another pipeline case from the Texas Court of Appeals (Ninth District) — the same panel that…

At a recent ABA conference, we suggested during our presentation that cases involving pipelines (petroleum, natural gas, etc.) would be “hot topics,” and here’s the latest: in In re Texas Rice Land Partners, Ltd., No. 09-12-00484-CV (May 23, 2013), the Texas Court of Appeals (Ninth District) held that TransCanada Keystone Pipeline, L.P. is…

Mark your calendars: on August 21, 2013, The Seminar Group is putting on the 2d Annual Eminent Domain and Condemnation Law Conference, in Honolulu (Hilton Waikiki Beach). Our Damon Key partner Mark M. Murakami is the Planning Chair, and the rest of the faculty is pretty good, too. 

We’ll be speaking at two of the…

A lot of interesting law review articles published lately, and here’s the latest: William Baude, Rethinking the Federal Eminent Domain Power, 122 Yale L.J. 1738 (2013). As the title suggests, the author argues that for 75 years, the original view was that the federal government lacked eminent domain power, because it was not…

Much of the interest in eminent domain law since Kelo v. New London understandably has been on the Public Use Clause, but as condemnation lawyers know, a supermajority of the issues in these cases involve the other part of the Takings Clause, the question of just compensation.

The shorthand usually employed is that an owner…

Watch Eminent Domain Case: How Can You Take My House? on PBS. See more from Constitution USA with Peter Sagal.

Here’s a video snippet focusing on eminent domain and the Kelo decision, from PBS’s ongoing series on the U.S. Constitution. It’s a somewhat generic view of the issue complete with silly sound effects and graphics…

In In re: Condemnation by PPL Electric Utilities Corp., No. 1389 CD 2012 (Pa. Comm’w May 8, 2013), a Pennsylvania state appeals court held the condemnation of property by a utility for a right-of-way to reconstruct electric lines already existing on the land, needed the prior approval of the Public Utilities Commission. The…