Monthly Archives: September 2009

(Williamsburg, VA) – William & Mary Law School will host the Sixth Annual Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference Oct. 16-17 in Williamsburg, Va. The conference is presented by the William & Mary Property Rights Project and the Institute of Bill of Rights Law.

The Institute for Justice announced this week that IJ lawyers had reached an agreement with Long Branch attorneys settling the eminent domain actions filed almost five years ago against a group of homeowners whose properties lie along Marine Terrace, Ocean Terrace and Seaview Avenue (MTOTSA) in Long Branch.

In a statement on its website, the Connecticut Office of Ombudsman For Property Rights announced the closure of the office effective September 8, 2009 as a result of budgetary constraints. Robert S. Poliner who held the position of the first and only Connecticut Ombudsman for Property Rights served only two years.

On September 4, OCA Hawaii Member Robert Thomas filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Owners’ Counsel of America in Stop the Beachfront Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Dep’t of Environmental Protection, No. 08-11 (cert. granted. June 15, 2009).
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether a 2008 Florida Supreme Court decision which upheld the Florida Beach and Shore Preservation Act and reversed more than a century of Florida law constitutes a “judicial” taking. Additionally, the Court will decide whether the Florida court’s decision violated the Fifth Amendment’s due process guarantee.

A New Jersey appeals court recently ruled that business losses resulting from a temporary taking of commercial property for the repair of public infrastructure must be compensated. In it’s August 27, 2009 opinion, the appellate court upheald a trial court’s dismissal of the New Jersey Department of Transportation’s attempted taking of such a property where its offer of compensation failed to consider the business losses. The appellate court, in State v. Arifee, A-5633-07, adopted a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that “an exercise of the power of eminent domain which has the inevitable effect of depriving the owner of the going-concern value of his business is a compensable ‘taking’ of property.”

Willets Point United Against Eminent Domain Abuse (Willets Point United) filed an amicus brief this week in support of a group of fellow NYC property owners, businesses and tenants who are fighting the use of condemnation and the taking of their properties for the proposed Atlantic Yards Arena and Redevelopment Project in Brooklyn. (For more detailed reporting of the proposed Atlantic Yards project, see Norman Oder’s Atlantic Yards Report.) The case, Goldstein v. New York State Urban Dev. Corp., is pending in the New York State Court of Appeals.