Enviro Wars Episode IV: A New Court
You may have heard that the Hawaii Legislature, after an intensive years-long effort by environmental groups, recently created a new court with specialized jurisdiction that could have a big impact on how property and business owners are treated by Hawaii’s courts.
Known as the “Environmental Court,” this new
The headline of this post shouldn’t be that surprising, especially when the the property owner purchased the land already subject to a floodplain designation, and those regulations effectively prohibited development.
But the two twists in the South Carolina Supreme Court’s opinion in Columbia Venture, LLC v. Richland County, No. 27563 (Aug. 12, 2015), were
Our American Bar Association colleague Ed Thomas (no relation, although we often joke that we’re probably cousins), the President of the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association and a guy who acknowledges that the need to protect against natural disasters must take property rights into account, has compiled some thoughts about the Court of Federal Claims’ recent
A long opinion (73 pages) from the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in St. Bernard Parish Gov’t v. United States, No. 05-1119L (May 1. 2015), and it is worth reading in its entirety (there are even photos and maps embedded). But here’s the short version:
In Arkansas Game & Fish, the United States
Here’s the trial court’s opinion in one of the Jersey Shore “dune replenishment” cases we’ve been following.
These are the cases in which owners of beachfront property (or in one case, a municipality itself) objected to the state and local governments summarily taking easements on private property to be used to armor the shoreline
The people of Margate City, New Jersey, voted to say “no thank you” to building dunes on the beach to limit damage in the event of another hurricane like Sandy were to hit.
But the State of New Jersey decided to do it anyway, and issued an administrative order “taking” an easement. Problem is
Back in February, we blogged about an opinion from the Maine Supreme Court involving littoral property (that’s beachfront property to all you non-lawyers and Navy people), in which the court concluded that those who were asserting a prescriptive easement over the plaintiffs’ beachfront property– the Town and several neighbors — had not rebutted Maine’s
Here’s the Verified Complaint in a case recently filed in U.S. District Court in New Jersey:
Plaintiffs Jenkinson’s Pavilion, a corporation of the State of New Jersey and Jenkinson’s South, Inc., a corporation of the State of New Jersey, (collectively “Plaintiffs”), bring this action, inter alia, (a) for a declaration as a matter of
Here’s the Brief in Opposition filed by the city Kentner v. City of Sanibel, No. 14-404, the case asking the Supreme Court to review an 11th Circuit decision in which the court concluded that riparian rights, although recognized by Florida as property rights, are not “fundamental rights” protected by the Due Process Clause. The
We’re tied up today and don’t have time to do any analysis, so we post this without comment: Bowman v. California Coastal Comm’n, No. B243015 (Oct. 23, 2014), wherein the court held:
In Kleiniecke v. Montecito Water District (1983) 147 Cal.App.3d 240, we held it would not be inequitable to apply the doctrine of