Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 1036.0

529ORD Unit: $PT1

[10-09-01 14:49:26] PGT: ORD1PP (Prelim. Print)

ORDERS

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Scalia, J., dissenting

housing stock.”
It is simply and
1 Appellants’ App., at 102.
obviously not true that the commission ignored petitioners’ re-
fusal to satisfy its fee demand.

The Court of Appeal itself, after asserting that “San Francisco
did not demand anything” from petitioners, 67 Cal. Rptr. 2d, at
569, in the next breath found it “somewhat disturbing that San
Francisco’s concerns about congestion, parking and preservation
of a neighborhood might have been overcome by payment of [a]
signiﬁcant sum of money,” ibid. (emphasis added). This observa-
tion makes no sense, of course, unless the court concluded from
the record that the commission might have rendered a different
decision if petitioners had been more generous.
It sought to
evade the natural consequence of that conclusion with the follow-
ing unelaborated assertion: “That the Planning Commission might
have granted the permit upon payment of $600,000 does not make
its refusal to issue the permit into a taking.”
Ibid. (emphasis
added).

There are three possible readings of the Court of Appeal’s opin-
ion. First, and most obviously, one might take at face value the
court’s factual ﬁnding that the fee played no role in the decision.
That would be a gross distortion of the record.

Secondly, one might ignore the court’s initial see-no-evil dis-
claimer, and assume that it accepted what the record undeniably
showed, that petitioners’ refusal to meet the fee demand was a
motivating force behind the commission’s decision. On that as-
sumption, the court’s refusal to apply Nollan and Dolan might
be thought to rest upon its determination that that factor was
irrelevant, since the commission also relied upon ordinary criteria
under the Planning Code. But it is always the case that if the
permit applicant does not yield to the extortionate demand, the
ordinary criteria will be invoked to deny his permit.
If indeed
unjustiﬁed denial can constitute a taking (the question presented
by the third basis for the decision, discussed below), Nollan and
Dolan can surely not be evaded by simply adding boilerplate
“ordinary criteria” language to the denial. The increasing com-
plexity of land-use permitting processes, and of the criteria by
which permit applications are judged, makes an “ordinary crite-
ria” claim almost always plausible. When there is uncontested
evidence of a demand for money or other property—and still as-
suming that denial of a permit because of failure to meet such a
demand constitutes a taking—it should be up to the permitting