In the recent case of Bowlby v. City of Aberdeen, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled that Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause property rights claims can be filed in federal court, despite the fact that the Supreme Court’s 1985 Williamson County decision bars many Takings Clause property rights claims from federal courts.
Robert Thomas of the Inverse Condemnation blog has a good summary of the relevant issues:
If you tried to explain the practical results of Williamson County’s ripeness requirements to someone not familiar in the last 30 years of regulatory takings jurisprudence, they would probably think you were joking….
[U]nder Williamson County, a property owner alleging a violation of her express federal constitutional right prohibiting takings without just compensation cannot bring that federal constitutional claim in a federal court. Instead, she is first required to present her state claim for compensation to a state court before she can even think of a federal action. And if she loses in state court, she will be deemed to have also litigated the federal claim, even if she expressly did not. Williamson County’s rationale was that there is no violation of the Fifth Amendment by a state or local government unless and until the property owner could both show that there was a taking, and that the state had denied compensation. So, you see, you have to lose your state takings claim to ripen your federal takings claim….
Williamson County gets particularly bizarre when courts extend it beyond the takings clause, since what thin justification exists for the rule is grounded in the language of the Fifth Amendment. Yet, the lower federal courts regularly apply it to Equal Protection and Due Process Claims, somehow transforming Williamson County from a limited takings requirement to a full-blown bar to the federal courthouse door for any plaintiff alleging a property-related claim….
Well, in Bowlby v. City of Aberdeen, No. 11-60279 (May 14, 2012), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit provided a different view, and injected a modicum of reality into the strange world of Williamson County. We won’t go too far into the case’s details, except to say that the plaintiff had a business permit, which the City summarily revoked. She sued in federal court for a taking and for procedural due process and equal protection violations, and the court promptly dismissed her complaint under Williamson County. She did not pursue an appeal of the takings dismissal, but asserted that Williamson County’s state litigation requirement of that case did not require dismissal of the due process or equal protection claim…..
The Fifth Circuit reversed, concluding that Williamson County is applicable only to takings claims, and not due process or equal protection [property rights] claims.
The Fifth Circuit is correct in ruling that there is precedent indicating that Takings Clause claims are treated differently from Due Process Clause and equal protection claims (see pp. 10-11 of the opinion). On the other hand, the logic of Williamson County is broad enough to cover not only other types of property rights cases, but nearly all constitutional rights claims against state and local governments. For example, if a state government tries to suppress an individual’s freedom of speech, we could require him to sue in state court because the government action might turn out to have been illegal under state law, or a violation of the state constitution. The same goes for any action by state or local government that might violate the federal constituion: there’s always a chance that a state court might strike it down as a violation of state law. Williamson County ruled that this possibility requires takings claims to be litigated in state court and then (in most cases) barred from federal court even if the property owner loses her state case. But the same “logic” readily applies to most other constitutional cases against state and local governments.
As I explained here, this arbitrary singling out of takings cases is one more example of the second class status of property rights in modern constitutional jurisprudence. In the 2005 San Remo case, four justices – including Justice Kennedy and Justice O’Connor, joined Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s concurring opinion arguing that the Court should reverse Williamson County and allow Takings Clause cases the same access to federal courts routinely extended to citizens asserting other violations of other constitutional rights:
The Court.. remark[s], that state courts are more familiar with the issues involved in local land-use and zoning regulations, and it suggests that this makes it proper to relegate federal takings claims to state court. Ante, at 23. But it is not apparent that any such expertise matches the type of historically grounded, federalism-based interests we found necessary to our decision in Fair Assessment. In any event, the Court has not explained why we should hand authority over federal takings claims to state courts, based simply on their relative familiarity with local land-use decisions and proceedings, while allowing plaintiffs to proceed directly to federal court in cases involving, for example, challenges to municipal land-use regulations based on the First Amendment….
Williamson County’s state-litigation rule has created some real anomalies, justifying our revisiting the issue. For example, our holding today ensures that litigants who go to state court to seek compensation will likely be unable later to assert their federal takings claims in federal court….
I joined the opinion of the Court in Williamson County. But further reflection and experience lead me to think that the justifications for its state-litigation requirement are suspect, while its impact on takings plaintiffs is dramatic.
Hopefully, the Supreme Court will eventually change its position on this issue, much as Rehnquist did.
UPDATE: Joshua Thompson of the Pacific Legal Foundation has more information about the case here. PLF filed an amicus brief supporting the property owner, which was extensively relied on by the Fifth Circuit in its decision.
UPDATE #2: Since property rights issues often split jurists along ideological lines, it is perhaps worth noting that all three judges on this panel were Democratic appointees.
UPDATE #3: I should briefly explain why it matters that these cases be able to go forward in federal court rather than state court. In many cases, state judges will protect federal constitutional rights just as well as federal courts do. In some situations, however, that will not be the case, either because the state judges are less competent than their federal counterparts or because they are less willing to uphold claims against the state government that they serve. The latter is particularly likely in cases where state judges (many of whom are elected) are part of the same political coalition as the state officials whose actions are being challenged as unconstitutional. As the Supreme Court explained in the famous case of Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816):
It is… argued, that no great public mischief can result from a construction which shall limit the appellate power of the United States to cases in their own [federal] courts…. [A]dmitting that the judges of the state courts are, and always will be, of as much learning, integrity, and wisdom, as those of the courts of the United States, (which we very cheerfully admit,) it does not aid the argument. It is manifest that the constitution has proceeded upon a theory of its own…. The constitution has presumed…. that state attachments, state prejudices, state jealousies, and state interests, might sometimes obstruct, or control, or be supposed to obstruct or control, the regular administration of justice. Hence, in controversies between states; between citizens of different states; between citizens claiming grants under different states; between a state and its citizens, or foreigners, and between citizens and foreigners, it enables the parties, under the authority of congress, to have the controversies heard, tried, and determined before the national tribunals.