Here it is -- Professor Gideon Kanner's final law journal article, published shortly before his passing:
Gideon Kanner, Eminent Domain Projects That Didn't Work Out, 12 Brigham-Kanner Prop. Rts. J. 171 (2023).
Appropriately, we think, published in William and Mary Law School's Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Journal, named in part in Gideon's honor.
This isn't a typical law journal article, but an essay collecting Professor Kanner's thoughts, comments, and (best of all) opinions on, well, eminent domain (and redevelopment) projects that didn't work out.
In Gideon's own words, from the Introduction:
But whether you favor widespread use of eminent domain or not, and whether the projects created by its use are sound or not, it is deplorable that the power of eminent domain has been often deployed to the detriment of racial and politically powerless minorities. Typically, redevelopment projects tend to displace middle class and poor people from their homes and businesses but provides parsimonious compensation that falls short of indemnity. The displaced people are limited by the courts to recovery of “fair market value” of their real property, which fails to include compensation for a variety of economic losses inevitably inflicted when people are involuntarily displaced. To add insult to injury, while talking glibly about indemnity, courts do not provide it and have not explained the reasons for this state of affairs. Too often they rely on factually unsupported lamentations—“fearful guesstimates” as one commentator put it—that full, realistic compensation would be too expensive or even cause an “embargo” on public works, as the California Supreme Court once asserted.What follows is a sampling of cases that failed to live up to their planners’ projections, including but not limited to redevelopment projects. The latter are particularly egregious because the linchpin of their success is a process of generating private gains for the private parties chosen to participate in those projects, while undercompensating the displaced populations of the areas targeted for redevelopment. Thus, the benefits, if any, of such projects are attained, if at all, on the back of condemnees, in violation of the principle that such costs should be fairly spread on members of the society that benefits from them and disproportionally imposed on people in the path of those projects.
Thank you to the editors of the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Journal for publishing it, in its unfiltered form.
Disclosure: I helped edit the piece, and Gideon even asked if it was worthy of publication (as if!). He described it as his "last" article collecting his collective thoughts. Yes, I responded, let's work on this and get it out for everyone to read (although I was secretly hoping that was not his final work). One of our University of Hawaii Law School Land Use students, Pono Arias, even volunteered his time and efforts as Gideon's Research Assistant and tracked down citations, made helpful edits and suggestions, and got the piece ready to go. We're grateful for Pono's work on this, as was Professor Kanner.
So here it is, Professor Kanner's last publication. When you read it, I am sure that - like me - you will hear it in your head in Gideon's voice.
And that's a good thing.
