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NEW UPDATE INFO This is an abstract from an article written by Gideon Kanner. As always, Gideon presents an Intersting perspective. The full article can be found here.
Gideon Kanner, Kelo v. New London: Bad Law, Bad Policy, and Bad Judgment, 38 Urb. Law. 201 (2006). Last term’s five-to-four Kelo decision has precipitated a great deal of controversy. Large numbers of Americans were dismayed and angered to find that anyone’s unoffending home may be seized and razed to convey the site to a municipally favored redeveloper, on the theory that redevelopment will increase revenues and wages, thus tending to revitalize the community. The decision has precipitated a flood of proposed (and in some cases enacted) legislation to curb this breathtaking expansion of unreviewable and unaccountable government power. It has also inspired an instant emergence of a cottage industry among government officials, redevelopment professionals, and the usual academic suspects who have reacted to the Supreme Court’s decision, by asserting that the legal and civic revolution wrought by the Court in the applicability of the eminent domain power was no revolution at all, but merely the invocation of long-standing precedent. In light of what the Kelo Court did decide, these assertions bring to mind a scene in the movie Jumbo, where Jimmy Durante is caught trying to sneak an elephant out of a circus, and when confronted by a guard, says, “Elephant? What elephant?”
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To get the dialog going, we here at Eminent Domain Today would like to submit the first case open for argument, Kelo v. City of New London. Was Kelo an ethically good decision? Not whether it was a correct legal decision, but if we asked 1,000 people around the country, what percentage would disagree with Kelo's outcome?
This is of course the ‘biggie’ of recent times. It was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States involving the use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another to further economic development. The case arose from the condemnation by New London, Connecticut, of privately owned real property so that it could be used as part of a comprehensive redevelopment plan. The Court held in a 5-4 decision that the general benefits a community enjoyed from economic growth qualified such redevelopment plans as a permissible "public use" under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
545 U.S. 469 (2005)[1]
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