A Texas court has ruled that a city ordinance prohibiting all drilling of gas wells in the city took the property of a company that had leased land for gas drilling purposes and been given permits in the past to do so. The company claimed that the denial of new permits to drill and the ordinance permanently prohibiting drilling rendered their lease without any value. The court agreed since the lease was limited to a use that was now illegal. No finding was made on...
After the Indiana Supreme Court held that private property rights end at the high tide land, giving the public the right to use the wet sand area between the low and high tide lines, see Gunderson v. State, 90 N.E.3d 1171 (Ind. 2018), an owner sued state officials to have that judicial ruling declared to be a taking of property rights without just compensation. But the Seventh Circuit held that the state courts were competent to determine whether...
The Michigan Supreme Court has held that when property is taken by the government to be sold to pay off unpaid property taxes, the proceeds of the tax foreclosure sale cannot be retained by the government if they exceed the amount of taxes that were due; the excess belongs to the homeowner. ...
The Michigan Supreme Court has condemned the practice of keeping all the proceeds of a tax sale of property (done because of failure to pay property taxes) when the city keeps all the proceeds of the sale, even though those are far more than needed to pay the taxes that were due. Rafaeli, LLC v. Oakland County, 2020 Mich. LEXIS 1219 (Mich. 2020)...
Several courts has addressed the question of whether temporary business closure orders to protect the public from Covid-19 constitutes regulatory takings of property. So far, the answer has been “no” as evident in a prominent decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Friends of DeVito v. Wolf, 227 A.3d 872 (Pa. 2020) (relying on Tahoe-Sierra Pres. Council, Inc....
In Alford v. United States, 961 F.3d 1380 (Fed. Cir. 2020), owners complained that the Army Corps of Engineers took their properties by temporarily flooding a nearby lake, knowing it would damage the plaintiffs’ property but doing so to avoid even greater damage to their property from a breach of the levee that was almost certain to occur if the Corps had not acted and which would have resulted in the complete destruction of plaintiffs’ properties. The Federal Circuit... Read more about No regulatory taking despite temporary flooding since the government’s action avoided more harm than it caused
The Federal Circuit held that two federal statutes may have effected takings of property without just compensation by preventing owners from exercising contractual rights to prepay government-insured mortgages on their housing projects which would have the effect of terminating government rent restrictions designed to keep the housing affordable by low-income families. ...
The Court of Federal Claims has held the United States responsible for a regulatory taking because it created reservoirs and dams that it knew, or should have known, would overflow onto neighboring property and did nothing to stop that from happening. In re Upstream Addicks and Barker (Texas) Flood-Control Reservoirs, 2019 WL 6873696 (Fed. Cl...
The Tenth Circuit has held that the police may destroy a home if they deem it necessary to apprehend a suspect, and that doing so triggers no obligation to pay just compensation under the fourteenth amendment. ...