Property rights

Here’s the supplemental letter brief, filed today on behalf of Rose Mary Knick, as requested by the Supreme Court. 

Two more — by the Township and by the SG — to be filed today as well. We shall post those as they become available. 

Letter Brief of Rose Mary Knick, Knick v. Township …

Earlier this week, we spoke to Howard Mansfield, author of the recently-published book “The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down – Our Belief in Property and the Cost of That Belief.”

His book is about property, property rights, and how these ideas are processed by the American psyche. But instead of…

They’re going back, to reargue the case with a full contingent of justices. In the January oral argument calendar published yesterday, the Supreme Court gave us the date and time: 

Wednesday, January 16, 2019, at 10:00 a.m.

We will be there, and will bring you our thoughts.  

Supreme Court Argument Calendar January 2019 

A unanimous opinion from the Supreme Court, which can only mean one thing: a narrowly-drawn opinion that doesn’t resolve much.

But we’re grateful anyway, because the opinion is one that appreciates the plight of property owners whose land is subject to being designated as “critical habitat” under the Endangered Species Act.

Intervenor Center for Biological…

Following the announcement that GM will be closing its Detroit-area Hamtramck assembly plant (originally a Cadillac plant), comes the reminder that it wasn’t supposed to be that way. This was the area, after all, condemned for “economic development” in the infamous Poletown case. 

But as the Detroit Free Press reported in “GM’s Hamtramck …

Get ready. In this and upcoming posts, we’re going to be featuring the items on our agenda for the upcoming ALI-CLE Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Litigation Conference, January 24-26, 2019, in sunny Palm Springs, California. 

ALI-CLE has released the brochure, which those of you on the mailing list should have received — …

Here’s the amicus motion and proposed brief we filed yesterday in a Third Circuit case we’ve been following, and which we wrote about recently.

In the few short days since that post, the owners are now also represented by the Institute for Justice, and have filed a petition for rehearing and rehearing en banc…

Retroactive continuity — or “retconning” — is, according to that authoritative source Wikipedia, a “literary device in which established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity.”

For example, compare the real-world explanation for why the 1960’s Star Trek show’s Klingons didn’t have…

Here’s the motion for leave and proposed brief amici curiae we filed yesterday in an appeal pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. 

This is a pipeline case (another one!) involving land in Florida. The district court got it right, concluding that the property owner/condemnee was entitled to recover …