Law Commons^™

Superfluous Judicial Activism: The Takings Gloss, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the summer of 2021, the Supreme Court released opinions in three Takings Clause cases. The Justices did not focus primarily on the dozen words that compose that Clause. Instead, the Court considered the expansive judicial gloss on those words, the extratextual aspects established by takings opinions over the last 100 years, since the “too far” test introduced by Justice Holmes in Pennsylvania Coal. The “Takings Gloss” is the product of holdings expanding the meaning and reach of the Takings Clause, a tangled web of opinions that have troubled lawyers, judges, and commentators for several decades. With the latest contributions, …

A Reign Of Error: Property Rights And Stare Decisis, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

Mistakes matter in law, even the smallest ones. What would happen if a small but substantively meaningful typographical error appeared in the earliest published version of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion and remained uncorrected for several decades in versions of the decision published by the two leading commercial companies and in several online databases? And what would happen if judges, legal commentators, and practitioners wrote opinions, articles, and other legal materials that incorporated and built on that mistake? In answering these questions, this Article traces the widespread, exponential replication of an error (first appearing in 1928) in numerous subsequent cases …

Recreational Rights To The Dry Sand Beach In Florida: Property, Custom And Controversy, Alyson C. Flournoy, Thomas T. Ankersen, Sasha Alvarenga

UF Law Faculty Publications

At the close of the 2018 legislative session Florida Governor Rick Scott signed HB 631 into law. Included in the bill, which addressed a number of issues relating to actions for ejectment from real property, was an amendment to the Florida Community Planning Act entitled “Establishment of Recreational Customary Use.” The new statute immediately created a sandstorm of controversy as the media seized on what many in the public perceived to be a land grab over the public’s right to recreate on Florida’s sandy beaches. As it turns out, the story is considerably more nuanced, and neither the advocates on …

Beach Law Cleanup: How Sea-Level Rise Has Eroded The Ambulatory Boundaries Legal Framework, Alyson C. Flournoy

UF Law Faculty Publications

As the sea level rises, the boundaries between privately owned coastal property and sovereign submerged lands held in public trust are becoming increasingly contested. The common law doctrines that determine these boundaries under conditions of change—primarily accretion, erosion, reliction, and avulsion—have important implications for all those involved in adaptation planning along our coasts. This includes private owners of coastal property, local government officials seeking to develop and implement adaptation strategies, beachgoers seeking to use shrinking beaches, beach-tourism-dependent businesses, and courts facing cases involving boundary disputes at the water’s moving edge. This paper raises the questions of whether and how the …

Moving Forward By Looking Back: The Retroactive Application Of Obergefell, Lee-Ford Tritt

UF Law Faculty Publications

The recent Supreme Court decision of Obergefell v. Hodges has forever altered American jurisprudence. Not only did this decision make same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states, but it also required states to recognize same-sex marriages from other states in accordance with the 14th Amendment. The Court’s holding in Obergefell raises a fundamental question with serious legal and financial significance: when exactly do these once unrecognized marriages legally begin? And to what extent must courts apply Obergefell retroactively? The stakes are high and substantive financial effects are pending on the answer to this question — for, with marriage, comes wide-ranging …

Doing A Double Take: Rail-Trail Takings Litigation In The Post-Brandt Trust Era, Danaya C. Wright

UF Law Faculty Publications

After providing a brief explanation of railroad development, railbanking, the takings cases, and the Brandt Trust decision, this Article will explore the implications of each of these three legal issues at the heart of the takings disputes. What makes the decision in Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States particularly disappointing is not that the Court came to the wrong conclusion in its interpretation of the railroad’s interest in federally granted railroad rights of way (“FGROWs”) granted pursuant to the 1875 General Railroad Right of Way Act, but that its wrong interpretation adds all of the 1875 Act FGROW …

Substantive Due Process By Another Name: Koontz, Exactions, And The Regulatory Takings Doctrine, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

In Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, a 5-4 majority of the United States Supreme Court reversed a state court decision that had limited the application of Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. City of Tigard. Nollan and Dolan concern the imposition of regulatory conditions on proposed development, also called exactions, which commonly occurs in land use regulation. In Koontz, a property owner challenged a regulatory agency's denial of his permit application following failed negotiations over exactions. The Florida Supreme Court had concluded that Nollan and Dolan did not extend to conditions that …

Reliance Interests And Takings Liability For Rail-Trail Conversions: Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust V. United States, Danaya C. Wright

UF Law Faculty Publications

On October 1, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in a relatively obscure case,Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States. On its face, the case involves an interpretation of the property rights created by the General Railroad Right of Way Act of 1875, which gave to any railroad, chartered by a state or territory, "[t]he right of way [200 feet wide] through the public lands of the United States." The 1875 Act was passed after a brief hiatus in congressional support for railroads following the era of lavish land grants between 1862 and 1871, in which over …

New Era Of Lavish Land Grants: Taking Public Property For Private Use And Brandt Revocable Trust V. United States, Danaya C. Wright

UF Law Faculty Publications

J.R. Pole's new book, Contract and Consent: Representation and the Jury in Anglo-American Legal History, is a delightful romp through centuries of Anglo-American history, law, and political theory. It would be better titled Contract, Consent, Juries, Sovereignty, and the State: A History of the Anglicization of Western Political Ideas. But in any event, this delightful set of essays, some more closely linked together than others, spans a breathtaking set of ideas--from sovereignty to the social compact to slavery to the moral agency of juries--through a breathtaking set of sources--from Slade's Case to Shakespeare to Aquinas to Faust to …

The Brooding Omnipresence Of Regulatory Takings: Urban Origins And Effects, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

This essay, written on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Fordham Urban Law Journal, discusses the urban settings for key regulatory takings decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, reviews the state of expert commentary before the rebirth of regulatory takings in the high court, explores the complex relationship between liberal justices and private property rights protection, reviews regulatory takings scholarship that has appeared in the pages of this journal, and closes with some thoughts about the future of urban regulatory takings

Strategies For Making Sea-Level Rise Adaptation Tools 'Takings-Proof', Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

While the costs of some Sea-Level Rise (SLR) adaptation tools are undeniably daunting, the American legal system poses an additional, potentially budget-busting impediment — the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Officials at all governmental strata and from all three branches should keep the demands made by the Takings Clause, as interpreted by the judiciary, in mind as they choose tools from the diverse SLR-adaptation toolbox, as they justify their choices to the electorate and other constituencies, as they put those tools to use, and as they defend that use from litigants claiming abuse. This …

Conservation Easements And The "Term Creep" Problem, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Essay first discusses the “term creep” problem that has long plagued the Anglo-American common law of real property, that is, the tendency of common law courts (and in turn commentators and legislators) to use the same label to describe two or more conceptually discrete, though related, concepts. The confusion between easements of the “traditional” and “conservation” varieties is just one in a long line of situations in which the decision to allow often significantly dissimilar concepts to share the same name has led to unfortunate consequences. The second part of the Essay explains the substantive nature of the hybrids …

Failed Exactions, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

This symposium essay considers the doctrinal quandary created by 'failed exactions' - regulatory conditions on property development that government agencies contemplate but that are never finalized or enforced, usually because the property owner rejects them. A narrow but conceptually challenging issue to the relationship between the unconstitutional conditions doctrine and regulatory takings law, failed exactions could prove profoundly unsettling to current land use practices. A decade ago, the issue of whether failed exactions deserve heightened scrutiny prompted Justice Scalia to issue a dissent from a denial of petition for certiorari in which he stated, somewhat tentatively, that an extortionate demand …

A Yellow Light For “Green Zoning”: Some Words Of Caution About Incorporating Green Building Standards Into Local Land Use Law, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

The focus of this essay is a growing practice to which we can attach the label “Green Zoning” — the incorporation of LEED and competing privately generated standards into local government law, as part of the existing zoning or land use ordinance, or as a free-standing green building ordinance. After reviewing some of the pertinent literature on this topic, this essay will highlight and provide illustrations of six problems with Green Zoning practices: 1. The Delegation Problem — Can and should local laws be based on a moving target (standards set by private parties that continue to change and evolve)? …

Technical Correction Or Tectonic Shift: Competing Default Rule Theories Under The New Uniform Probate Code, Lee-Ford Tritt

UF Law Faculty Publications

Succession law, the law governing trusts and estates, is experiencing an identity crisis. Similar to an individual going through a midlife crisis, the laws of succession seem to be in search of a new purpose or meaning. It seems odd that a legal discipline as old as private property succession law would lack the continuity of some shared jurisprudential image. Yet, despite its historical legacy, succession law appears to have neither a complete descriptive theory (explaining what the law is) nor a complete normative theory (explaining what the law should be), hence the identity crisis.

It may seem intuitive that …

The Stubborn Incoherence Of Regulatory Takings, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A., Inc. was met with restrained but largely appreciative notice by commentators. Lingle declared that the Takings Clause affirmatively protects property owners by awarding them compensation for regulations that impose the functional equivalent of a condemnation of their property. The regulatory takings doctrine thus differs from the substantive due process doctrine, which instead reviews the validity of a regulation and offers as its remedy the invalidation of an offending government action. Clearing the underbrush that had grown in nearly a century of Supreme Court precedent, the Court appeared to have made …

Charitable Deductions For Rail-Trail Conversions: Reconciling The Partial Interest Rule And The National Trails System Act, Scott Andrew Bowman, Danaya C. Wright

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines an undeveloped legal topic at the intersection of tax law and real property law: charitable deductions from income tax liability for donations of railroad corridors that are to be converted into recreational trails. The very popular rails-to-trails program assists in the conversion of abandoned railroad corridors into hiking and biking trails. However, the legal questions surrounding the property rights of these corridors have been complex and highly litigated. In 1983, Congress amended the National Trails System Act to provide a mechanism for facilitating these conversions, a process called railbanking. In essence, a railroad transfers its real property …

The Shifting Sands Of Property Rights, Federal Railroad Grants, And Economic History: Hash V. United States And The Threat To Rail-Trail Conversions, Danaya C. Wright

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article is an analysis of a federal circuit case from 2005 that has spawned some disturbing precedents in the area of federal transportation and railbanking policy. Specifically, the National Trails System Act (NTSA) provides a mechanism for preserving unused railroad corridors for future reactivation while allowing interim recreational trail and mixed utiity use along the corridor. Converting rail corridors to recreational trails is a very popular process and communities across the country are demanding more and more conversions, as people seek the amenities of linear parks and greenways.

Hash v. United States, however, deals with the property rights …

The New Nuisance: An Antidote To Wetland Loss, Sprawl, And Global Warming, Christine A. Klein

UF Law Faculty Publications

Marking the fifteenth anniversary of Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council -- the modern U.S. Supreme Court's seminal regulatory takings decision -- this Article surveys Lucas's impact upon regulations that restrict wetland filling, sprawling development, and the emission of greenhouse gases. The Lucas Court set forth a new categorical rule of governmental liability for regulations that prohibit all economically beneficial use of land, but also established a new defense that draws upon the states' common law of nuisance and property. Unexpectedly, that defense has taken on a life of its own -- forming what this Article calls the new …

The Takings Clause, Version 2005: The Legal Process Of Constitutional Property Rights, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

The search for coherence in takings jurisprudence has resulted in a multitude of theories but no consensus. Each theory -- whether based on conceptions of common law property rights or constitutional conceptions of justice, or based on utility, natural law, or communitarian or republican conceptions of the good --offers significant insight into the vexing legal, political, and normative issues that judicial enforcement of the Takings Clause raises. But no single theory of property or of constitutional limits on state regulation and expropriation has proven capable either of satisfactorily rationalizing existing takings law or of persuading the courts or the theory's …

Defending The Polygon: The Emerging Human Right To Communal Property, Thomas T. Ankersen, Thomas K. Ruppert

UF Law Faculty Publications

For many peoples in the developing world, "homeland security" has a meaning very different from its post-September 11 meaning in the United States. In many cases, peoples who have a shared cultural conception of "territory" within nation-states have begun to adopt the dominant Western property paradigm of land titling to formalize their rights to that territory. Many view this paradigm and the individualization of property rights it facilitates as an inevitable outcome of the inexorable march of social evolution, evidenced by the end of the twentieth century collapse of communism. The Enlightenment era conception of fungible individual property emerged triumphant. …

Regulating Land Use In A Constitutional Shadow: The Institutional Contexts Of Exactions, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

The regulatory takings doctrine, the Supreme Court declared in Lingle v. Chevron, concerns the effects of a regulation on the incidents of property ownership. It serves as a constitutional protection against regulations that impose the functional equivalent to a classic taking of private property (an appropriation by the state or an ouster), and it requires compensation for owners who are subject to such regulations. Just as significant as declaring what the regulatory takings doctrine is, theCourt in Lingle also declared what it is not: it is not a judicial check onthe validity or reasonableness of a regulation that …

Yes, Thankfully, Euclid Lives, Charles M. Haara, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

Professors Haar and Wolf reiterate their endorsement of Progressive jurisprudence, as embodied in the Supreme Court's opinion in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., despite Professor Eric Claeys's effort to expose the political theory underlying Progressive legal thought. They highlight problems with Professor Claeys's portrayal of the actual practice of zoning and with his use of history, problems that seriously undercut Professor Claeys's findings regarding the political beliefs of early zoning and planning advocates, the evolution of zoning law in the courts, and the role natural law played in American legal history.

Takings Formalism And Regulatory Formulas: Exactions And The Consequences Of Clarity, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

A vocal minority of the U.S. Supreme Court recently announced its suspicion that lower courts and state and local administrative agencies are systematically ignoring constitutional rules intended to limit, through heightened judicial review, exactions as a land use regulatory tool. This article argues that the Court's suspicions are well founded but that blame for judicial and administrative noncompliance lies with the Court's bifurcated approach to the Takings Clause.

A New Time For Denominators - Toward A Dynamic Theory Of Property In The Regulatory Takings Relevant Parcel Analysis, Danaya C. Wright

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article explores the question of how the courts should calculate the denominator in the just compensation equation. The denominator is the amount of property a claimant owns, against which the effects of regulation will be measured. If a landowner owns a single acre that is severely regulated, the takings fraction for the amount of property taken compared to that owned will approach one. If, on the other hand, the landowner owns 100 acres and only one is regulated, the amount of harm is only 1% in comparison to the total amount owned. This Article advocates a paradigm shift in …

Euclid Lives: The Survival Of Progressive Jurisprudence, Charles M. Haara, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court's expanded use of regulatory takings is making a highly controversial and confusing concept more difficult to apply and defend. The Court and commentators are invited to explore a different approach-- Progressive jurisprudence, as represented by the Court's enduring opinion in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co . This Commentary examines the reinvigoration of the Takings Clause and, in historical and ideological terms, discusses the Progressiveness of Euclid and of the regulatory scheme the Euclid Court approved. Professors Haar and Wolf identify and explore five inquiries concerning the character of regulations affecting the use, ownership, and value …

Eminent Domain, Exactions, And Railbanking: Can Recreational Trails Survive The Court’S Fifth Amendment Takings Jurisprudence, Danaya C. Wright

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article attempts to locate the legal aspects of recreational trail development within the increasingly powerful property rights movement. The most complex result of this rising property rights rhetoric is a clear shift in constitutional takings doctrine to be more sympathetic to landowners' arguments. Thus, the interplay of takings decisions and trails development will be the focus of most of this article.

Part II provides a brief account of the legal structure of governmental land use controls and the current state of takings jurisprudence to form a basic background for the different ways in which recreational trails have been developed. …

Taking Regulatory Takings Personally: The Perils Of (Mis)Reasoning By Analogy, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article includes four parts: (1) a defense of the real property/personal property distinction for a post-deconstructionist legal world, (2) a review of difficulties common law courts have encountered when applying real property concepts to disputes over money and personalty, (3) an exploration of the "rhetorical mismatch" typified by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion in Eastern Enterprises, and (4) a respectful request for judges to resist the temptation to collapse categories and instead to maintain, or even erect, meaningful distinctions.

Foreword: Toward A Multicultural Theory Of Property Rights, Danaya C. Wright

UF Law Faculty Publications

This panel, sponsored by the Minority group and Property Sections of the AALS for the January, 2000 annual meeting, was composed of an exciting group of scholars critically analyzing traditional theories of property and current distribution of resources. The panel, entitled "Reviewing the Legacy of Liberalism: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- Linking Property to Rights," challenged traditional notions of property rights, from a discussion of the gender implications of African property law, to a critique of traditional analyses of Johnson v. M'Intosh, to property as heteronormative. Because the articles provide so much rich and thought-provoking material, …

Pipes, Wires, And Bicycles: Rails-To-Trails, Utility Licenses, And The Shifting Scope Of Railroad Easements From The Nineteenth To The Twenty-First Centuries, Danaya C. Wright, Jeffrey M. Hester

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article responds to a series of class action suits filed against railroads, telecommunication companies, and the federal government claiming that once railroads abandon their corridors, all property rights shift to adjacent landowners. This Article reviews the state law on this matter and offers a theory of how courts should handle these cases. After discussing the history of nineteenth-century railroad land acquisition practices, we analyze the scope of the easement limited for railroad purposes. We then discuss the role abandonment plays in affecting the rights of third party users of these corridors as well as successor trail owners. We conclude …