Property rights

You all have likely seen ’em, those “We Buy Houses Any Condition” billboards letting the world know that no matter what condition it might be in, there’s an outfit that says it is willing to buy your house.

Well, that outfit ran into the one other outfit that is willing to buy your house

Erie
The site of the Erie incident, just a mile away from Mahon’s home.

Here’s an unusual, and kind of interesting one, from a U.S. District Court (Hawaii) in an eminent domain case brought by the County of Maui against the owner of Maui property which is needed for a solid waste disposal site

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

Screenshot 2024-07-14 at 09-00-18 Sheetz v. County of El Dorado Legislatures Must Comply with the Takings Clause by Brian T. Hodges Deborah La Fetra SSRN

Check this out: our Pacific Legal Foundation colleagues (Brian Hodges and Deborah La Fetra we on our Sheetz SCOTUS team), have posted a new scholarly piece on SSRN, “Sheetz v. County of El Dorado: Legislatures Must Comply with the Takings Clause.”

Here’s the Abstract:

For more than 30 years, the Supreme Court

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

IMG_20180719_154523
The famous corner of India and Milk, Boston
(at least for takings nerds)

Today, along with our friend and colleague Hawaii eminent domain lawyer Mark M. Murakami, we filed this Application for a Writ of Certiorari* in a condemnation case that has been pending for more than a decade (including more than five

Worth reading: a student-authored piece in the latest issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, “Original Understanding of ‘Background Principles’ in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid.

From the Introduction:

But in Cedar Point, when considering a regulation that authorized union organizers to enter certain businesses, the Court

BetterCoastalCommnReportCover

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

Today is a good day to remember that legal emancipation had its roots in the “contraband” property theory. Here’s a post from a few years ago where we visited what we called “The Birthplace of a More Perfect Union” (Fort Monroe, Virginia).

The contraband property theory was itself very imperfect, and a compromise