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Pennsylvania Gas: Trusts, Takings, And Judicial Temperaments, Joshua Ulan Galperin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Perhaps it is their role in our survival, or our economic growth, or the environment. Whatever the reason, energy and natural resource conflicts seems to be unique in the way they can drive significant doctrinal change even outside of energy and natural resource law. Pennsylvania has been a fountainhead of these conflicts. In 1921, Pennsylvania’s Kohler Act and lesser known Fowler Act, which sought to protect surface owners from anthracite coal mine subsidence and to increase tax revenue from anthracite mining, ignited the legal wrangling that eventually led to Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon. That U.S. Supreme Court decision transformed …

Property-As-Society, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

Modern regulatory takings disputes present a key battleground for competing conceptions of property. This Article offers the following account of the three leading theories: a libertarian view sees property as creating a sphere of individual freedom and control (property-as-liberty); a pecuniary view sees property as a tool of economic investment (property-as-investment); and a progressive view sees property as serving a wide range of evolving communal values that include, but are not limited to, those advanced under both the libertarian and pecuniary conceptions (property-as-society). Against this backdrop, the Article offers two contentions. First, on normative grounds, it asserts that the conception …

On Bargaining For Development, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Timothy M. Mulvaney

In his recent article, Bargaining for Development Post-Koontz, Professor Sean Nolon concludes that the Supreme Court’s recent ill-defined expansion of the circumstances in which land use permit conditions might give rise to takings liability in Koontz v. St. John’s River Water Management District will chill the state’s willingness to communicate with permit applicants about mitigation measures. He sets out five courses that government entities might take in this confusing and chilling post-Koontz world, each of which leaves something to be desired from the perspective of both developers and the public more generally.

This responsive essay proceeds in two parts. First, …

Progressive Property Moving Forward, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Timothy M. Mulvaney

In his thought-provoking recent article, “The Ambition and Transformative Potential of Progressive Property,” Ezra Rosser contends that, in the course of laying the foundations of a theory grounded in property’s social nature, scholars who participated in the renowned 2009 Cornell symposium on progressive property have “glossed over” property law’s continuing conquest of American Indian lands and the inheritance of privileges that stem from property-based discrimination against African Americans. I fully share Rosser’s concerns regarding past and continuing racialized acquisition and distribution, if not always his characterization of the select progressive works he critiques. Where I focus in this essay, though, …

Legislative Exactions And Progressive Property, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Timothy M. Mulvaney

Exactions — a term used to describe certain conditions that are attached to land-use permits issued at the government’s discretion — ostensibly oblige property owners to internalize the costs of the expected infrastructural, environmental, and social harms resulting from development. This Article explores how proponents of progressive conceptions of property might respond to the open question of whether legislative exactions should be subject to the same level of judicial scrutiny to which administrative exactions are subject in constitutional takings cases. It identifies several first-order reasons to support the idea of immunizing legislative exactions from heightened takings scrutiny. However, it suggests …

Florida Rock Industries, Inc. V. United States: Tipping The Scales In Favor Of Private Property Rights At The Public's Expense, Susan E. Spokes University Of Maine School Of Law

Maine Law Review

In Florida Rock Industries, Inc. v. United States the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that the denial of a federal wetlands permit under section 1344 of the Clean Water Act may constitute a compensable taking of private property under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The court remanded the case to the Federal Court of Claims to determine the value of the property remaining after the permit denial, while warning the trial court that the existing record did not support a finding of the loss of all economically viable use of the property. The Federal …

The Law Of Taking Elsewhere And, One Suspects, In Maine, Orlando E. Delogu

Maine Law Review

The debate as to the meaning of the Taking Clause in the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution seems unending. This short, almost cryptic constitutional provision, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation,” has over the years given rise to both court challenges and philosophic debate aimed at parsing out the meaning and parameters of this language. As the need for regulatory controls (imposed by every level of government) has increased, the number of challenges and the stridency of the debate has also increased. Moreover, these challenges have increasingly found their way to the …

When Should Rights "Trump"? An Examination Of Speech And Property, Laura S. Underkuffler

Maine Law Review

In his well-known article, Property, Speech, and the Politics of Distrust, Professor Richard Epstein—a leading contemporary voice in the fields of property theory and constitutional law—makes a simple but compelling argument. There has been, he argues, a mistake in “the dominant mode of thinking about property rights during the past fifty years [that] has been ... of constitutional dimensions.” This mistake, in Professor Epstein's view, is the refusal of the federal courts to accord to individual property rights the same kind of protection from government regulation that is accorded to other constitutional rights. Using free speech as his example, Professor …

Federalism, Convergence, And Divergence In Constitutional Property, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

Federal law exerts a gravitational force on state actors, resulting in widespread conformity to federal law and doctrine at the state level. This has been well recognized in the literature, but scholars have paid little attention to this phenomenon in the context of constitutional property. Traditionally, state takings jurisprudence—in both eminent domain and regulatory takings—has strongly gravitated towards the Supreme Court’s takings doctrine. This long history of federal-state convergence, however, was disrupted by the Court’s controversial public use decision in Kelo v. City of New London. In the wake of Kelo, states resisted the Court’s validation of the …

The [̶T̶A̶K̶I̶N̶G̶S̶] Keepings Clause: An Analysis Of Framing Effects From Labeling Constitutional Rights, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan