February 2020

Profcorner.jpf

Please mark your calendars and join us next Tuesday, February 11, 2020 at 12:30pm ET for the free (for members of the ABA’s Real Property, Trust and Estate Section) webinar, the monthly “Professors’ Corner.”

This one will be on the aftermath of Knick v. Township of Scott, 139 S. Ct. 2162 (2019), in which the Supreme Court formally overruled the “state procedures” ripeness requirement in federal regulatory takings cases. 

We shall be speaking about the case and what’s next along with Professors Stewart Sterk and Michael Pollack (moderated by Professor Shelby D. Green). Here’s the summary of the webinar from the ABA website:

Last term, in Knick v. Township of Scott, the Supreme Court overruled the long-standing requirement that state takings claims first be litigated in state courts. The Court held that a property owner has an actionable takings claim when the government takes property without paying for…

Continue Reading Tuesday Feb 11, 2020: Professors’ Corner – The Supreme Shift in Takings Litigation – Knick v. Township of Scott

As we briefly mentioned in the “National Eminent Domain Update” at the recent ALI-CLE Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Litigation Conference in Nashville, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Sabal Trail Transmission, LLC v. 3.921 Acres, No.18-11836 (Jan. 22, 2020), recently held that it isn’t an abuse of discretion for a trial court to allow a property owner to testify about value if she meets the standards in Federal Rule of Evidence 701.

Two interesting aspects to this case:

1.    The owner’s opinion of value was higher than the owner’s appraiser’s opinion of value. 

2. The owner testified about severance damages. 

The district court allowed the testimony because the property owner had direct experience with the property and sales of other parcels the company owned, even though she lacked experience with the particular use for which this parcel was taken (a …

Continue Reading CA11: Owner May Provide Opinion Of Value, Including Severance Damages

In case you were not able to attend the recent program sponsored by Howard University Law School about the “heirs property” issue (Jan. 29, 2020), they recorded it and have now posted it on YouTube. 

Here’s a description of the program:

Experts say that real estate is the steadiest and safest way to build wealth in America. And yet, African Americans continue to be displaced from their homes and land. For example, the last century has seen a precipitous decline in the amount of black-owned agricultural land, partly as a result of the heirs property land ownership system, which has been exploited to force partition sales and remove black families from their property. And heirs property is hardly the only example of the pernicious impacts of property rights insecurity. Here in the District, gentrification is displacing African American residents at some of the highest rates in the country. Nationally…

Continue Reading Video: The Biggest Problem You’ve Never Heard Of (“Heirs Property And Black Property Loss”)