If you ever wanted a primer on the sometimes-confusing and seemingly arcane world of Rails-to-Trails takings cases, you would be hard-pressed to find a better example of the substantive law and the procedures in these cases than the Court of Federal Claims opinion in Nicholson v. United States , No. 23-843 (Mar. 13, 2024).
There’s nothing particularly outrageous about this case, but that’s one of the reasons why we appreciate the time that Judge Tapp put into the opinion (and the effort our colleagues Lindsay Brinton and Meghan Largent put into the case).
Here’s how the opinion starts off:
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods[.]” Yet for the Hyatt and Nicholson Plaintiffs (collectively referred to as “Plaintiffs”), that pleasure was replaced with the pain of usurped property rights. Tn its pursuit of public amenities, the United States transformed Plaintiffs’ land previously burdened by an unused railway into a