No sooner was the ink dry on the Supreme Court’s opinion in Knick v. Township of Scott, than the Court’s decision started to have some effect.
First, the Court granted another pending cert case on takings ripeness and sent back down to the Ninth Circuit for more in light of Knick.
And now this
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
Here’s one we’ve been waiting to drop. In KMS Retail Rowlett, LP v. City of Rowlett, No. 17-0850 (May 17, 2019), a deeply divided Texas Supreme Court held that a statute — adopted in response to Kelo — which seems to limit eminent domain power, also contains a massive hole: according to the court
Here’s what we’re reading today, in between real work:
Remember that Christopher Nolan movie from a few years ago, “Inception,” with its dream-within-a-dream storyline?
Well, that’s what a recently-filed cert petition which asks the U.S. Supreme Court to jump into California’s inverse-condemnation-liability-for-wildfires issue reminds us of with its taking-within-a-taking argument, as detailed in the Question Presented:
Whether it is an uncompensated
