In Kelo, the dissenters were O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas.
The evil Scalia, the even eviller Thomas, and the moderately evil Rehnquist, all enemies of civil rights. :rolleyes:
See what happens when the Court decides it cares about the result more than the text?
I don’t even know what you’re trying to snark about here. I think it’s well established that this was a surprising ruling in which the traditional ally lines were wacked out. It just might not seem that way from the Dope’s perspective considering our heavy libertarian leaning.
OK, so here’s what bothers me about this.
Joe S owns a home and property. BoxStore Corp wants to build upon the property.
BoxStore can make Joe an offer for his property,a nd continue to raise that offer until they reach a number that Joe can’t resist, and he sells. This so-called use of eminent domain is not about forcing Joe off of his property, it’s about forcing him to take a lower price for the property.
If developers want to make a profit off of property, they should be forced to pay whatever is necessary for the land that they need, or develop around it. I don’t think that Government should step in and steal the additional profit from a private citizen to put it in the pockets of the Corporation.
Why can’t it be about both?
What if Joe S is 90 years old, has lived in the house for 60 years, and doesn’t want to move, no matter how much money they give him? He can’t use the money anyway, and he doesn’t want to leave the place that has been his home for more than half a century. In that case, it is about both forcing him off his property, AND possibly forcing him to take a lower price.
Note that the takings clause of the Constitution requires “just compensation.” I’m pretty sure that what is considered “just” in cases like this often varies considerably from case to case. I’m not familiar enough with eminent domain law or con law to know whether there have been any Supreme Court rulings specifically on the issue of what constitutes “just compensation,” and how it relates to things like market value, the use to which the land will be put, etc., etc.
“Just compensation” = fair market value as assessed by an independent appraiser. If the parties disagree on what constitutes fair market value, a judge decides.
The Dope.
Libertarian?
Yeeeeaaaahhhh… let’s just let that one lie. I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, but I want some.
And of course, there is no such thing as fair market value. That is, the price paid by one person has nothing whatsoever to do with the price paid by another. A more honest use of this term might be “Some guy runs off and takes a wild guess based on other properties around.”
Ironically, the majority were using what are generally considered conservative legal principles. They didn’t rule that the New London plan was a great idea. Their ruling was that local officials rather than federal judges should be allowed to decide what the rules for public use were - they were trying to avoid accusations that they were “lochnerizing”.
That’s what the judge is for.
I don’t know what it was but I’m sure I used to buy it in Fort Trumbull. Another loss for the area.
Except that the government has all sorts of ways to fuck mightily with “fair market value”.
They slap the label “Blighted neighborhood” on a perfectly good neighborhood and the property values drop 60% (number pulled from my ass).
They decide that because your basement floods, it’s a “protected wetlands”, and it drops 60%.
Hell, just by saying “Eminent domain-we’re snatching your land”, the property values plummet.
There’s probably a fair way to do it (take the highest assessed property value of the last 10 years, or find the highest price a comparable home in the neighborhood sold for in the last 10 years or something) but that’s often not what happens.
By the way-some quasi-libertarian group tried to use Kelo to snatch Souter’s home to make a museum or something. Anyone remember that? What became of it?
What evidence do you have that the Kelo majority reached an outcome in accord with their personal preferences of the result? Are liberals notoriously fond of Pfizer or local government? It seems to me that the better moral to take from the story is that sometimes the Court is too reluctant to overturn established precedent. If you re-read the opinion, the majority has the better interpretation of Supreme Court precedent and the dissents’ attempts to say that “public purpose” in the precedent doesn’t really mean public purpose is pretty facile. But, the dissent simply has the better constitutional argument, and sometimes the Court should be prepared to accept that the precedent is wrong.
From Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine.
Damn. I was hoping the good guys won on that one.
But thanks for the info Alienhand! 