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Should Lucas V. South Carolina Coastal Council Protect Where The Wild Things Are? Of Beavers, Bob-O-Links, And Other Things That Go Bump In The Night, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council is one of several recent Supreme Court decisions in which the Court used the Just Compensation Clause as a "weapon of reaction" to strike down an offending land use restriction. In Lucas, the target of the Court's animus was a state law prohibiting a landowner from developing two beachfront lots. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the law as a legitimate exercise of the State's police power to protect the public from harm in the face of a takings challenge by the landowner. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the South Carolina court's talismatic …