Public Use | Kelo

Recently, we requested crowdsourcing of this year’s “come to the ALI-CLE Eminent Domain Conference video.” Instead of doing the video ourselves, we asked folks to “please send a short clip of you and/or your colleagues telling us why you think the Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Litigation Conference is the place to be

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Details soon. In the meantime, get your earlier registration discount.

Eminent domain lawyers know that even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the property owner in Kelo, it acknowledged that there was a (slight?) hope in some cases where the condemnor’s stated public use or purposes is actually “pretext” to private benefit.

Pretext may be present in at least three situations: (1) when eminent

The Colorado Supreme Court issued an opinion in a case we’ve been following on public use in eminent domain. in which it reframed the Questions Presented.

In Carousel Farms v. Woodcrest Homes, No. 2018SC30 (June 10, 2019), the court reversed the court of appeals’ conclusion that a taking lacked a public purpose because

Here’s one we’ve been waiting to drop for a while, on an issue we wrote about earlier this week.

In Puntenney v. Iowa Utilities Board, No. 17-0423 (May 31, 2019), the Iowa Supreme Court — taking a different view than Kentucky — held that a pipeline which runs through Iowa, but which

An issue we’ve been tracking for a while — are takings for pipelines for the public’s benefit? — raises another question: how is “the public” defined?

Some courts, like Kentucky’s, define the public as the public which the jurisdiction serves. In the Bluegrass Pipeline case, for

In City of Dublin v. RiverPark Group, LLC, No. 18AP-607 (May 9, 2019), the Ohio Court of Appeals (Tenth District), the city exercised eminent domain — via Ohio’s version of “quick take” (immediate possession, not title) — to take an easement “for the purposes of constructing roadway improvements … and a shared-use path adjacent

North Dakota, as you might expect, can be cold in the winter. So cold that railroad switches need to be heated, else they get… frozen. The railroad uses refillable propane tanks, but these need to be refilled from time to time. And North Dakota is so cold in the winter that sometimes, the propane trucks