Property Law

The California Supreme Court’s relatively short unanimous opinion yesterday in City of Oroville v. Superior Court, No. S243247 (Aug. 15, 2019) may have a bigger impact outside of that case than within in. While that is undoubtedly true in many decisions by a precedential court of last resort, we highlight that here because inverse condemnation is a trending topic in California right now due to the multiple litigations spawned by a series of wildfires…
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We’re about to get underway with the fall semester at William and Mary Law School, where we’re again teaching an upper-division course, Eminent Domain and Property Rights.  We’ve more than doubled the size of last year’s enrollment, so it looks like the word is getting out. We cover not only eminent domain and just compensation, but takings (yes, we have a lot of new materials to cover there), civil forfeiture, a small bit of…
Check this out. What at first appears to be something along the lines of the grainy Zapruder film (this particular piece was recorded on video, not film, and certainly well before the days of high-res camera phones that we now take for granted) is an important piece of takings history. It is (the late) Anthony Palazzolo driving his famous “wetlands” property, recorded after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in his favor in Palazzolo …
Attorney Katerina Tsoukalas-Heitkemper received a successful result for her condominium association client after an extensive four-month forensic investigation led by Kathy (with the assistance of her HOA law team and client) revealed that the Association’s former employee, a licensed on-site community association manager, had committed multiple acts of theft and employee dishonesty over a four year time-frame resulting in a financial loss to the Association in excess of $150,000.  A newly elected Board President asking…
Attorney Katerina Tsoukalas-Heitkemper received a successful result for her condominium association client after an extensive four-month forensic investigation led by Kathy (with the assistance of her HOA law team and client) revealed that the Association’s former employee, a licensed on-site community association manager, had committed multiple acts of theft and employee dishonesty over a four year time-frame resulting in a financial loss to the Association in excess of $150,000.  A newly elected Board President asking…
Mark your calendars for Thursday, August 22, 2019, 2 – 3pm ET, for a free ABA program, “When the Floods and Fires Come: Landowner’s Property Damage Claims.” This session, produced by the Section of Litigation and organized by our Damon Key colleague Mark Murakami. Featured speakers are our colleagues Anthony Della Pelle (NJ), Kristen Renfro (CA), and Pepperdine lawprof Shelley Saxer (CA). Here’s the description: In the wake of the Superstorm Sandy,…
Don’t worry, you didn’t miss the U.S. Supreme Court issuing a major eminent domain case. Today’s post is about a decidedly older decision, Danforth v. United States, 308 U.S. 271 (1939).  The reason we’re posting this decision now, eighty years after it was issued, is that a colleague recently passed on a note with a cite to the case. So we dusted off the opinion and read it (again). And when we did, this…