The Nasty, Brutish, and Short Life of Agins v. City of Tiburon

By OCA Members Gideon Kanner and Michael Berger

IF THE DUKE OF YORK’S MEN THOUGHT they were being made to perform useless, repetitive tasks to no worthwhile end, they were in about the same condition as the American lawyers who were practicing tak- ings law in the 1970s and 1980s. During that period of time, hordes of lawyers representing the competing sides in regulatory taking cases were sent, figuratively, charging up the hill to the Supreme Court (which, to make the analogy complete, sits on top of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.) in an effort to do intellectual battle over the issue of remedies in regulatory taking cases. That issue was whether such takings call for constitutionally mandated “just compensation” as specified in the Fifth Amendment, or only for judicial invalidation of the constitutionally overreaching regulation. Read on.