Real Estate & Property Law

NY Times On Property Owner Amici In Beachfront Takings Case

By Robert Thomas (inversecondemnation.com)

The New York Times' Greenwire blog posts Property Rights Groups Assemble Support in Regulatory Takings Case, about amici support in Stop the Beachfront Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Dep't of Environmental Protection, No. 08-11 (cert. granted. June 15, 2009).

Property rights groups are lining up in support of private waterfront landowners in Florida at the center of a case that the Supreme Court will hear later this year.

Twelve groups, including the National Association of Home Builders and the Cato Institute, have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida, which turns on whether Florida's Supreme Court violated the Constitution's regulatory takings clause when it upheld a plan to create a state-owned public beach between private waterfront land and the Gulf of Mexico.

. . .

Stop the Beach Renourishment will be the first taking case to come before Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor -- a fact not lost on either side.

"It will be really interesting to see how this plays out as the first important takings case before the Roberts court," [Lawprof Benjamin] Barros said. "We can guess which way they might vote, but we don't have that much to go on. My guess is that we won't see much of a shift in the court's approach to takings cases, because the new justices are relatively close ideologically to those they replaced."

Read the entire post here. Note: the original post mistaken reported the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association, Florida Shore and Beach Preservation Association, the Florida Association of Counties and the Florida League of Cities were planning on filing a brief in support of the property owners; that has been corrected to reflect that they plan to file an amicus in support of the state.

The amici briefs in the case filed thus far are posted here, here, and here. More about the case on our resource page.

Full post as published by inversecondemnation on August 26, 2009 (boomark / email).