[Ilya Somin, August 1, 2007 at 5:52pm] Trackbacks
My Legal Times Article on Wilkie v. Robbins:

I have just published an article in the Legal Times on the Supreme Court's important, but largely overlooked, property rights decision in Wilkie v. Robbins. Here's a brief excerpt:

Lost in all the attention devoted to the Supreme Court’s more high-profile end-of-term cases was an important property rights decision issued on June 25: Wilkie v. Robbins . . .

In the short run, the main effect of Wilkie is to ensure that some property owners will not have adequate remedies for violations of their constitutional rights by federal government officials. This is a potentially serious problem in Western states . . . where the federal government has extensive landholdings and disputesbetween federal agents and local property owners periodically lead to violations of constitutional rights.

More broadly, Wilkie reinforces the long-standing second-class status of constitutional property rights. In previous cases..., the Court often defined the scope of property rights in a much more restrictive way than is usually applied to “noneconomic” rights such as freedom of speech and religion. In Wilkie, it ensured that even indisputable violations of constitutional property rights will be compensated less adequately than violations of other individual rights.

The article was partly based on several VC posts that I wrote about Wilkie. See here, here, and here.

Related Posts (on one page):

  1. My Legal Times Article on Wilkie v. Robbins:
  2. Shortcomings of the Thomas-Scalia view of Wilkie v. Robbins and Damage Remedies for Violations of Constitutional Rights:
  3. "Legitimate" and "Illegitimate" Government Motives in Wilkie v. Robbins and the Second Class Status of Constitutional Property Rights:
  4. Wilkie and the "War on the West":
  5. Barring Bivens Actions for Property Owners:
  6. Wilkie v. Robbins and the Future of Constitutional Property Rights:
  7. Property Rights' Unlikely Champion in Wilkie v. Robbins:
SeaLawyer:
This ruling was terrible. I can't setup a commercial enterprise on my neighbors property, and then file a lawsuit against him when he documents my trespassing violations and calls the cops on me.
8.1.2007 8:46pm
SeaLawyer:

According to Robbins, government agents repeatedly trespassed on his property and harassed his customers.
In one instance, they even allegedly tried to videotape female customers in the act of relieving themselves.


This harassment was government agents documenting trespassing violations on Federal property not Robbins property.


But the effort to achieve this purpose by
forcing the owner to give up the easement without compensation was an unconstitutional means to an otherwise legitimate end.


This is incorrect the government offered to maintain the road and grant access to existing government roads. After Robbins denied the government access to the road, the government then stopped maintaining the rest of the road on federal land. Robbins then sent a bill to the blm for repairs to the road. This shows that Robbins needed that road to run his business, the governments maintenance of the road is compensation, as well is the access to the roads on federal land.


Souter further suggests that the government’s actions were just an instance of “hard bargaining” to achieve a legitimate end. That is a strange way to describe a six-year campaign of illegal harassment he himself analogized to “death by a thousand cuts.”


What was illegal about it?
8.1.2007 9:06pm