Eminent Domain | Condemnation

Cal Emergency EO

You remember the TV trope where Starsky, Hutch, or some other police officer is in hot pursuit of a dangerous criminal and flags down a motorist and “commandeers” their private vehicle and drives off?

We thought of that when we were reading the news reports about various governments invoking their emergency powers to respond to

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Here’s the cert petition that we’ve been eagerly waiting to drop in a case we’ve been following (and which gathered a lot of public — and academic — attention and outrage). 

Yes, this is the case where the Village police pretty much destroyed a family home in the course of their efforts to dislodge a

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At the recent ALI-CLE Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Litigation Conference in Nashville, our colleagues, New York’s Jon Houghton and Hawaii’s Dave Day presented a very informative program on litigating regulatory takings cases. Jon is a property owner-side lawyer, while Dave is a Deputy Attorney General who represents the State of Hawaii in such

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We just completed a fun hour-long talk with the students in the William and Mary Law School’s American Constitution Society, the Native American Law Society, and the Society on Environmental and Animal Law about the various pipeline cases that are ongoing nationwide. (If our tech worked, we shall post the audio recording in a future

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Update: here’s a report (video included!) about our spring “field trip” to what arguably is the birthplace of a “more perfect union” (which just happens to be right down the road from William and Mary Law School).

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This semester, we’re teaching a short course at William and Mary Law School (and yes, thanks to

Here’s the latest episode of Clint Schumacher’s Eminent Domain Podcast. Featuring an interview with the Institute for Justice’s Robert McNamara about an eminent domain case we’ve been following, Woodcrest Homes, Inc. v. Carousel Farms Metro. Dist., No. 19-607 (cert. petition filed  Nov. 7, 2019). Also included, a short talk with Delia Root

Peasants carousing

The last two cert-stage briefs have been filed in a case we’ve been following for a while (since it was decided by the Colorado Court of Appeals). 

In Carousel Farms Metro. Dist. v. Woodcrest Homes, Inc., 444 P.3d 802 (Colo. App. 2017), the appeals court invalidated an attempt to exercise eminent domain to

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Where is this? The clues are all in the picture. 

You’ve seen the citation so many times, your eyes probably gloss over it. After all, Westlaw lists it with 4,507 “Citing References.” That’s a heckuva lot of citations to a single case. 

Like this one, pulled from a recent random federal district court opinion: 

Chcago cite

And

We were all set to take a deeper dive into the Court of Federal Claims’s recent opinion in the “downstream” Harvey flooding cases (we could not do so at the time the opinion was issued last week because we were tied up doing real lawyer stuff), when our Reno, Nevada colleague Steve Silva (who most

Check out the latest (and final) episode of the Institute for Justice’s “Bound by Oath” podcast. IJ’s John K. Ross was kind enough to ask us to be a guest on the show titled “Excessive Fines,” and our friend and colleague Bob McNamara and I sat down in Nashville to record our