A lot is being written about Friday’s Supreme Court opinions in Knick v. Township of Scott, No. 17-647 (U.S. June 21, 2019) (including us). Here’s a sampling.
We’ll be doing a longer post with our thoughts on the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Knick v. Township of Scott, No. 17-647 (June 21, 2019). But here’s the big picture.
It appears that at least five Justices finally seem to understand what we in the property bar have been saying for decades
Property lawyers, dust off your Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and federal judges your long vacay from dealing with regulatory takings and inverse condemnation cases is over, because this just in: by a 5-4 margin (Chief Justice Roberts authored the majority opinion, with Justice Kagan writing the dissent), the U.S. Supreme Court today finally (finally!)
The recent opinion of the Texas Court of Appeals (First District) in University of Houston v. Jim Olive Photography, No. 01-18-00534 (June 11, 2019) addressed a fascinating (and still unsolved) question: does intellectual property qualify as “property” for purposes of the takings clause?
The court held “no,” but that answer isn’t definitive.
The facts
A must-read for takings mavens. Property rights gurus Professor Gideon Kanner and Michael Berger have published a new article, The Nasty, Brutish, and Short Life of Agins v. Tiburon, 50 Urb. Lawyer 1 (2019). It’s the lead article in the latest volume of The Urban Lawyer, the law journal of our Section of
Our friend and colleague Dwight Merriam recently published this piece about the looming Knick v. Township of Scott decision. Yes, ripeness, and how SCOTUS will treat regulatory takings. We posted our own prognostications here (“Shaka, When The Walls Fell: Yes, Knick Will Be About Takings, But It Will Be More About Federalism“).
Awaiting
Here are the links to the cases which were not in your materials. Theme of the day: amateurs!
Our thanks to colleagues Jill Gelineau and Paul Sundermier for asking us to present. It was good to see our Oregon friends again.
In Berry v. City of Chicago, No. 1-18-0871 (May 22, 2019), a divided Illinois court of appeals reversed the dismissal of an inverse condemnation claim, holding that even though the potential damage was widespread, the plaintiffs might be able to show that they incurred damage beyond those incurred by the general public.
The case
There’s a lot to digest in the draft workgroup reports of the California Commission on Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery, which were released yesterday.
But the bottom line stands out: California’s version of inverse condemnation liability — which holds a private utility liable for just compensation and damages if its activity was a cause
With the opinion in the Knick v. Township of Scott case to drop as soon as Tuesday (we’re guessing the opinion will be by Chief Justice Roberts, by the way), hold on: we’re about to get super nerdy here. Impossibly nerdy. Yes, we’re revisiting the Star Trek analogies. We’ve been down this road before