James Ely on Stevens, Kagan, Obama, and Property Rights

Vanderbilt lawprof James Ely – a leading expert on constitutional property rights – has an interesting column on the relevance of property rights to the current Supreme Court nomination:

In seeking a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, President Obama indicated that he wanted to name someone in the Stevens mold. Among the qualities of Justice Stevens that Mr. Obama hoped to find in a successor, the president noted “a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people.”

However, in at least one important area of constitutional law – the rights of property owners – Justice Stevens’ record fell woefully short of protecting the interests of average citizens. In fact, Justice Stevens consistently dismissed property rights claims and voted to strengthen government control over the lives of individuals….

Justice Stevens’ propensity to minimize the rights of property owners was demonstrated vividly in his opinion in the controversial case of Kelo v. City of New London (2005). At issue was a city economic redevelopment plan under which land acquired from residents through eminent domain would be transferred to private parties for the construction of new residences, stores and recreational facilities…. Pfizer Corp. helped instigate the redevelopment plan in the hope that the new facilities would benefit its planned new headquarters. The area slated for redevelopment was a middle-class neighborhood that was not blighted or dilapidated. A few of the neighbors challenged the condemnation on grounds that it was not permissible under the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, which limits the exercise of eminent domain to “public use.” Writing for the court majority, Justice Stevens rejected this argument and upheld the taking of property for economic development purposes. He stressed heavy deference to governmental determination of what amounted to public use and was especially impressed with the notion that this taking was part of a development plan….

Because Justice Stevens barred courts from attempting to “second guess” the quality of a plan, as a practical matter, municipalities could easily prepare a plan that in reality benefited private interests. There is yet another problem with the Stevens opinion. The very purpose of the Bill of Rights is to safeguard individuals from abuses of governmental power. Broad deference to the officials it is intended to restrain is inconsistent with this purpose.

In Kelo, Justice Stevens virtually eviscerated the public use limitation of the Fifth Amendment at the federal level. Under his reading of public use, legislators appear to have almost unlimited power to take homes and businesses for economic development. The beneficiaries likely will be corporations and others with political clout…..

The framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights believed that protection for private property was essential for self-government and individual liberty. In sharp contrast, Justice Stevens invariably manifested statist thinking about the property rights of individuals. His legacy is a testament of how far we have wandered from the constitutional vision of the framers.

Hopefully Elena Kagan, Mr. Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Stevens, holds a more balanced view of the importance of property rights in the American constitutional order. As in many other fields of law, however, Ms. Kagan’s record with respect to property rights is a blank slate. It certainly would be appropriate for senators at Ms. Kagan’s confirmation hearing to ask about her thoughts on this subject.

As I have argued previously, there is a potential for fruitful left-right alliances in this area. Many left-wing organizations and activists, including the NAACP, Rep. Maxine Waters, and Ralph Nader, vehemently opposed the Kelo decision because they correctly recognized that giving government unconstrained power to condemn property and transfer it to private parties would tend to victimize the poor, minorities, and the politically weak.

In The Audacity of Hope, President Obama wrote that “[]o]ur Constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty…. The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history.” Unfortunately, his first Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, had a very poor record on property rights, as I explained in my Senate testimony at her confirmation hearings.

As Ely points out, Elena Kagan has almost no record in this field. Hopefully, her relative openness to ideas that depart from liberal orthodoxy might come into play here.

In the federal Supreme Court, property rights issues have split the justices along left-right lines over the last thirty years. But as the left-wing reaction to Kelo demonstrates, such a division is not inevitable. In some state judiciaries, liberal judges have voted to enforce tight state constitutional restrictions on eminent domain and exclusionary zoning, a point I discussed in the last part of this article.

If he is so inclined, it is not too late for President Obama to start appointing relatively pro-property rights liberals to the federal courts. Breaking the ideological logjam that has hobbled federal judicial protection of constitutional property rights would be an admirable example of change we can believe in.

UPDATE: Readers interested in this subject should check out Ely’s excellent 2005 article “Poor Relation Once More: The Supreme Court and the Vanishing Rights of Property Owners,” where he critiqued several of Justice Stevens’ important opinions in this area in more detail. Ely’s book The Guardian of Every Other Right is perhaps the best general history of constitutional property rights, and is must-reading for students of the field.

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