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The Land Use Institute, a program that for many years has been planned by co-chairs Frank Schnidman and Gideon Kanner, has found a new home with the American Bar Association’s Section of State and Local Government Law as the main sponsor. It also has a new Planning co-chair, Dean Patty Salkin of Touro Law School, who has stepped in for Professor Kanner.

This program is designed for attorneys, professional planners, and government officials involved in land use planning, zoning, permitting, property development, conservation and environmental protection, and related litigation. It not only addresses and analyzes the state-of-the-art efforts by government to manage land use and development, but also presents the key issues faced by property owners and developers in obtaining necessary governmental approvals.

This year, the one-day program is being held in conjunction with the ABA Annual Meeting in Chicago. It will be held on Thursday, July 30, 2015…

Continue Reading Land Use Institute: Planning, Regulation, Litigation, Eminent Domain, and Compensation – 31st Annual Conference, Chicago, July 30, 2015

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The hotel reservations link for the 2016 ALI-CLE Eminent Domain and Land Valuation and Condemnation 101 Conference is now live.

Reserve your hotel room now, via this link to ensure that you have a spot in the conference hotel. [note: link updated 7/8/2015]

We’re still working on the agenda and faculty, but here are the details thus far:

Date: January 28-30, 2016 (Thursday – Saturday)

Location: Hotel Van Zandt, Austin Texas

The Hotel Van Zandt is a new hotel (not even opened as of the date of this post), but our Austin sources tell us that it’s centrally located, close to everything that Austin is known for. More about the annual conferences — the premiere CLE programming on the subject, in our opinion — here. 

Stay tuned for more information. We’ll continue to keep you posted, and when the registration page at ALI-CLE is up and ready to…

Continue Reading 2016 ALI-CLE Eminent Domain Conference, Austin: Hotel Now Taking Reservations

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On Wednesday, July 1, 2015, the American Planning Association is putting on the 2015 Planning Law Review, a program highlighting the most important and topical cases decided by the courts recently. Here’s the program description:

Planning feels the impact of decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court, federal district courts, and state courts. How will their rulings affect you? Get a briefing on the year’s legal developments, from First Amendment issues to environmental actions, housing, and equal access. Presenters also will discuss major legislative initiatives and APA’s amicus filings. Join in a lively, informative program you and your staff, colleagues, and officials won’t want to miss. This program is also suitable for planning commissioners.

Joining me on the faculty are Jason Jordan, Director, Policy and Communications, American Planning Association (Moderator); Nancy Ellen Stroud, Lewis, Stroud & Deutsch; John M. Baker, Greene Espel; and John Echeverria, Professor of…

Continue Reading Upcoming APA Webinar: 2015 Planning Law Review

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            “It’s Frank’s world, we just live in it.”

                      – attributed to Dean Martin, about Frank Sinatra

A narrowly drawn opinion from the Supreme Court in Horne v. Dep’t of Agriculture, No. 14-275, argued in April and to be decided by the Court sometime before the Term ends this month, could attract more than the needed five Justices to form a bare majority, and the initial reports from the arguments agree that the Hornes’ takings argument appeared to gain traction with at least a couple of Justices from the Court’s left bloc. Combined with the property-friendly Justices and Justice Kennedy (who appeared to view the government’s arguments with great skepticism), they could put the Hornes well over the top. 

There may be much more at stake, however, if any part of the government’s…

Continue Reading Leviathan Shrugged: Oral Arguments In Horne Reveals The Taking, But Remedy Still Open

Hardly seems like a decade ago that the Supreme Court gave us eminent domain lawyers something to talk about at cocktail parties: the Court’s infamous and widely-hated decision in Kelo v. City of New London. 

Find out about what the intervening ten years has brought us from the Cato Institute, which is sponsoring a program later this week  about “Property Rights on the 10th Anniversary of Kelo v. City of New London.” 

Featuring Ilya Somin, Author, The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain, and Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law; Scott Bullock, Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice and Plaintiffs’ Counsel, Kelo v. City of New LondonKelo v. City of New London

The full agenda and registration information is here. If you can’t be in D.C. this week, you can watch the conference live…

Continue Reading Upcoming Conference On Kelo’s 10th Anniversary

For those of you who are members of the ABA Section of State and Local Government Law’s Land Use Committee (if you aren’t, you can become a member easily; just ask me how), please tune in on June 12, 2015 for our monthly teleconference.

Here’s the announcement:

Our third meeting is scheduled for Friday, June 12, 2015 at 2:00 pm EDT, and we will be featuring as our speaker, Robert Thomas, a land use lawyer and publisher of the law blog inversecondemnation.com (who is also the Chair of the Section’s Eminent Domain Committee) who will present a 20 minute program about the key takings case now awaiting decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Horne v. United States Dep’t of Agriculture. 

FREE Teleconference Sponsored by the Land Use Committee
Friday, June 12, 2015
2:00 p.m. EDT
Dial-in 888-3967955
Passcode 797687#

Everything a Land Use Lawyer Needs To Know About …

Continue Reading Mark Your Calendars June 12, 2015: Free ABA Teleconference “Everything a Land Use Lawyer Needs To Know About Dancing California Raisins: A Report From the Oral Arguments in Horne v. USDA”

If you have plans to be in Wisconsin or environs in June, the Wisconsin chapter of the Appraisal Institute is putting on its 12th annual Condemnation Appraisal Symposium at the Marquette Law School on Wednesday, June 3, 2015.

One of the featured speakers is Mike Berger on “Current National Eminent Domain Issues,” and there will also be presentations about power to take challenges, and thorny appraisal issues, among others.

Here’s the description from the event flyer:

The Condemnation Appraisal Symposium is the go-to event of the year for those real estate and legal professionals who are currently engaged, or who wish to be more involved, in eminent domain matters. This high-level program provides the latest information and open debate on condemnation case law, appraisal techniques and other timely topics presented by attorneys, appraisers, educators, and government officials, while again offering valuable networking opportunities with those practitioners active in this specialty…

Continue Reading Upcoming Wisconsin Appraisal And Eminent Domain Law Conference

A couple of noteworthy conferences upcoming, one in-person, the other a “webinar” format:

  • The first is “Kelo: A Decade Later” at the U. Connecticut Law School, Friday, March 20, 2015, from 8:30 am – 4:30 pm. The conference promises to “look back at the decision and its repercussions,” and includes the lawyers for Ms. Kelo and the City of New London. “The conference will then explore the role of eminent domain in government planning generally. What role does and should eminent domain play in economic development?  What is the impact of post-Kelo changes to state law?  Does eminent domain have distinctive impacts on low income communities?  Leading scholars and practitioners in law, planning, sociology, and economics will explore these questions.” We note that our Connecticut Owners’ Counsel colleague Dwight Merriam is one of those “leading practitioners,” and will be moderating a panel entitled “Eminent Domain and Economic Development”

…
Continue Reading Upcoming Conferences – Kelo In Connecticut, APA And The ESA

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Yesterday, on behalf of my Owners’ Counsel of America colleagues, I was pleased and honored to present to University of Hawaii School of Law Professor David L. Callies the Crystal Eagle, recognizing his lifetime of property law and property rights scholarship. 

Professor Callies’ present and former students (there are many), his faculty colleagues, the Hawaii property law bar, and his family and friends came to my law firm in downtown Honolulu to congratulate him with a short ceremony followed by a reception.  

Associate Justice Sabrina S. McKenna of the Supreme Court of Hawaii (and a former student and law faculty colleague of Prof. Callies) introduced him. We’ll post her remarks — which included haiku! — and more photos and videos of the event, and a transcript of everyone’s words, shortly.

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The Honolulu event was the “local” version of the formal presentation of the Crystal Eagle in San Francisco at…

Continue Reading Presenting The Owners’ Counsel Crystal Eagle To U. Hawaii Lawprof David Callies

Weird headline from KITV. No, owners whose property is taken for the rail aren’t “profiting” if they are able to get more for their land than what the condemning agency offered; “just compensation and damages” are required by the constitution, and if they are able to obtain more, in many cases that still leaves them undercompensated and simply means the condemnor’s offer was inadequate.

But besides the headline, KITV does a good report on last night’s community forum on property owners’ rights in eminent domain which we sponsored. 

Related articles
Tommorrow’s Public Rail Project Forum: Eminent Domain, Just Compensation, And Protecting Property Rights
hawaiioceanlaw.com: Knowing Your Rights: Honolulu Rail Project and Right of Way Acquisitions
inversecondemnation.com: Property Owners Invited: Honolulu Rail Project Public Informational Meeting, Thursday, March 5, 2015, Farrington High School
NJ Court: There’s No Substitute For The Eminent Domain Process, Even On The Shore, Even In An

Continue Reading Video: Report On Community Meeting On Property Rights And The Honolulu Rail