Property rights

We were not as creative as our colleague Paul Henry (see below), but our Planning Co-Chair Joe Waldo and I wanted to personally invite you to join the “big guns” in our area of law at the 37th Annual ALI-CLE Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Litigation Conference, January 23-25, 2020, in Nashville, Tennessee.

We’ve

Here’s the video of (most, but not all of) the recent session featuring four lawprofs discussing “Originalism and Constitutional Property Rights” at the Federalist Society lawyers’ meeting. 

Interesting debate, all about the text of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the “original public meaning of the Takings and Due Process clauses, and all that

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Here’s the latest in a case we’ve been following for a while, Smyth v. Conservation Comm’n of Falmouth, No. 19-223 (cert. petition filed Aug. 16, 2019). 

The petition seeks review of a Massachusetts decision which held that a judge, not a jury, determines Penn Central takings questions, and also that the owner lost anyhow

Check this out: the Complaint, filed a couple of days ago in federal court against the State of New York (and others), that alleges the state’s recently-adopted rent control regulations is a taking (among other claims). 

It’s a long complaint so we shall leave it to you to delve into the details yourselves. Most

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We add a flowchart to this post because the Washington Supreme Court on page 15 of its opinion in Yim v. City of Seattle, No. 95813 (Wash. Nov. 14, 2019) (em banc) (Yim I), includes a flowchart that purports to solve the regulatory takings puzzle once and for all.

Really.

You should

All seemed to be going well for the property owners in a Florida takings case. They obtained a satisfactory compensation judgment for the taking of their healthy citrus trees (yes, this is that case). And because Florida’s Constitution requires “full” compensation, they were also entitled to attorneys’ fees and costs. $13 million in compensation

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You may recall that last October, we attended the first round of Supreme Court oral arguments in the Knick case with our William and Mary law class (Law 608: Eminent Domain and Property Rights).  

And even though there’s not a takings case on the Court’s current docket, we figured that the Maui Clean

Yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments in what is known as the “DACA case” would normally not be something we’d cover on this blog. Yeah, the issue of whether the executive branch has the power to unwind (or, as the cert petition puts it to “wind down”) a prior administration’s executive actions is interesting and

Here’s the OA video (courtesy of the Michigan Supreme Court) from last week’s arguments in what we’re calling the “keep the change” case. 

That’s the one where the government is arguing that after a property owner was late paying $8.00 in property taxes, the government is not only entitled to foreclose on the property, but