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.