Municipal & Local Govt law

Hat tip to ABA State and Local Government Law colleague (and fellow U.H. Law School alum) Julie Tappendorf for the lead on a newly-published article: John M. Baker and Katherine M. Swenson, Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District: Trudging Through a Florida Wetland with Nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices, in the latest…

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.

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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:

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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…

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…

If you haven’t figured out by now, we like takings claims. We really do. But here’s one where we think the Third Circuit reached the right result when it concluded that there was no compensable taking. National Amusements, Inc. v. Borough of Palmyra, No. 12-1630 (May 9, 2013).

Why? Because when there may be…

We generally don’t cover unpublished decisions, but since we’re adding this case to our “to watch” list, we’re making an exception. In 62-64 Main Street, LLC v. Mayor and Council of the City of Hackensack, No. A-3257-11T4 (N.J. Super. May 3, 2013), the Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court held that “the…

Here’s the opinion of the California Court of Appeal (1st District) in an appeal we’ve been following, Lockaway Storage v. County of Alameda, No. A30874 (May 9, 2013), affirming that the County of Alameda is liable for a temporary regulatory taking under Penn Central, and awarding the property owners nearly three-quarters of a…

A short one from the Texas Court of Appeals (Third District), involving inverse condemnation. In City of Austin v. GHI Investments, LLC, No. 03-12-00198CV (Tex. App. Apr. 30, 2013), the court held that flooding resulting from the city’s approval of drainage designs that were part of a road widening and bike lane project, stated…