Environmental law

2025 San Diego

Get ready to join your colleagues and friends in San Diego for the 42d ALI-CLE Eminent Domain & Land Valuation Litigation Conference.

The 41st Conference was in New Orleans. Here’s a report of that event, and here are our reports from prior conferences in Austin and Scottsdale.

Here are some of the

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Justice Sutherland asks:
whadda mean, you don’t like apartments?

Check out this uncharacteristically-lengthy opinion from New York’s Appellate Division (and entire 6 pages!).

In Bennett v. Troy City Council, No. CV023-0709 (Oct. 24, 2024), the court invalidated a municipal upzoning (from single-family residential to Planned Development — which would permit apartments) because the city’s

Following up on our recent post about the California Coastal Commission denying permission for Space-X to increase the number of annual launches from Vandenberg, comes this, the other shoe.

The Commission has now been sued, with Space-X alleging that the Commission denied permission due to CEO Elon Musk’s political leanings and his public

Check out this decision, entered by a Rhode Island Superior Court (a general jurisdiction trial court) denying the State’s motion for summary judgment. The court concluded that a recently-adopted statute shifting the boundary between public and private property on RI’s beaches is a taking.

We won’t be commenting in too much detail because this

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The California Coastal Commission is infamous for being the most out-of-control governmental agency in the nation. This regulatory leviathan fancies itself the undisputed czar of land use and other activities in its fiefdom, the California coastal zone.

Created in 1976 as an agency with regulatory authority across California’s 1,000+ miles of coast (and land in

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There are some rewards for working late in the 808

Yesterday was the last day of instruction for the Spring 2024 semester at the University of Hawaii Law School. Did these last few months ever go by fast. 

A big thank you to Professor Mark M. Murakami, with whom I guest-lectured at the Old

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When it comes to the longstanding ALI-CLE American Law Institute-CLE Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Litigation Conferences, we’re always ready to go. You know that. But this year’s version — the 41st — was buzzing like no other in recent memory.

Maybe it was the New Orleans venue with its atmo, food, and music for

Don’t miss out!

We promise: this is the last time we’re going to try to entice you to the upcoming ALI-CLE Eminent Domain & Land Valuation Litigation Conference in New Orleans. We are getting close to capacity, but there is still room. In recent years, we have standing room only in the Conference halls, and

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Bismarck in January is looking pretty good.

Here’s what we’re reading today:

  • Christian Britschgi, Court’s Wild Zoning Decision Blocks ‘Montana Miracle’, Reason (Jan. 2, 2024) (“In an eyebrow-raising decision, a Montana judge has halted the implementation of two laws legalizing duplexes and accessory dwelling units on residential land across the state, writing that they’d

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Starting in January, we’ll be helping our friend and former law partner Mark M. Murakami with the venerated and oh-so-important Land Use course (Law 580) at the University of Hawaii’s Law School.

We’re temporarily stepping into some mighty big slippers (this is Hawaii, so we don’t always wear shoes), as this is the course that