In today’s New York Times, leading legal reporter Adam Liptak has an informative article about Sonia Sotomayor’s dubious property rights decision in Didden v. Village of Port Chester, which I previously criticized here and here. In Didden, a court of appeals panel headed by Sotomayor upheld the condemnation of two businessmen’s property because they refused a politically connected developer’s demand to either pay him $800,000 or allow him a 50% stake in their business.
Liptak does a good job of summarizing the case and its importance, though some legal details have inevitably been omitted. I was slightly surprised to see the article draw an apparent contrast between my view of Didden’s significance and that of Richard Epstein, the leading University of Chicago and NYU lawprof with whom I coauthored an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to reverse Sotomayor’s decision in the case: