zoning

For the past couple of days, we’ve been in Denver, attending the 2026 Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute at Denver Law School. The program is pretty wide-ranging. Everything from very land-usey topics like state-local delegation, zoning, and takings, and broader subjects like housing policy, western history lessons, and planning strategies. In attendance: private practice lawyers, government lawyers, elected officials, public interest lawyers, legal scholars, planners, and zoning officials. …
Continue Reading Sunny (And Not So Sunny) Days At The 2026 Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute

Next week, we’ll be at the Denver Law School for the 2026 Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute’s “Western Places | Western Spaces” annual conference. Earlier in our career, we were a fairly regular attendee, but for mesne reasons (unrelated to the conference) our ability to attend kind of fell off. Recognizing that shortcoming, we attended the 2025 Conference last year. This convinced us that indeed, we were missing out. In short, the RMULI has returned as a featured event on our calendar.
Continue Reading Join Us At The Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute (Denver) To Talk Sheetz, And Housing

Here’s what’s on our radar screen today: Anthony Flint, How Zoning Won (Bloomberg) (“In 1926, the Supreme Court’s Euclid decision enshrined zoning in US cities. On its 100th anniversary, academics gathered to reflect on the landmark ruling’s mixed legacy.”)…
Continue Reading Today’s Dirt Law Round-Up: Zoning, Public Use, and Penn Central History

We’re spending the day at the alma mater, talking alongside some of the luminaries in the field (lawprofs Thomas Mitchell, Henry Smith, John Inafranca, Thomas Merrill, and Pamela Sameulson, among others) about our favorite topics: dirt law and property rights. This is the “Future of Property Rights” Conference that we mentioned not long ago at the University of Hawaii Law School. …
Continue Reading 2026 Future of Property Law Conference, University of Hawaii Law School

Be sure to check out the North Carolina Court of Appeals’ recent opinion in LDI Shallotte 197 Holdings, LLC v. North Carolina, No. COA24-443 (Jan. 21, 2026), where the court held the plaintiff’s allegation that a two-year delay in the State issuing a permit adequately pleaded a temporary taking claim. The court reversed the dismissal of the complaint. …
Continue Reading NC App: Two-Year Permit Delay Could Be A Temporary Taking

In Lifetime Communities, Ltd. v. City of Worthington, No. 25-3048 (Jan. 27, 2026), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the city’s refusal to upzone a vacant parcel from “S-1” (which permits only parks, hospitals, churches, and other similar institutional uses) to a designation that would allow mixed-use development, was not a Penn Central taking. …
Continue Reading CA6: Denial Of Rezoning Is Not A Penn Central Taking

Pictured: PLF’s Steve Davis, getting us started. We’re underway today with the academic symposium “Euclid Turns 100: Rethinking an Antiquated Case and Reimagining Euclidean Zoning for the Century Ahead” at the George Mason Law School. Cosponsored by the law school’s Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy, Mercatus Center, and our outfit Pacific Legal Foundation, the symposium is designed to focus the discussion of housing, zoning, and property rights (hot topics in the headlines), and ask the question: has Euclidean zoning outlived its usefulness? And if so, what, if anything, should replace it?
Continue Reading Symposium: “Euclid Turns 100: Rethinking an Antiquated Case and Reimagining Euclidean Zoning for the Century Ahead”