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524US2

Unit: $U94

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EASTERN ENTERPRISES v. APFEL

Opinion of Kennedy, J.

Our cases do not support the plurality’s conclusion that the
Coal Act takes property. The Coal Act imposes a stagger-
ing ﬁnancial burden on the petitioner, Eastern Enterprises,
but it regulates the former mine owner without regard to
property.
It does not operate upon or alter an identiﬁed
property interest, and it is not applicable to or measured
by a property interest. The Coal Act does not appropriate,
transfer, or encumber an estate in land (e. g., a lien on a par-
ticular piece of property), a valuable interest in an intangible
(e. g., intellectual property), or even a bank account or ac-
crued interest. The law simply imposes an obligation to
perform an act, the payment of beneﬁts. The statute is in-
different as to how the regulated entity elects to comply or
the property it uses to do so. To the extent it affects prop-
erty interests, it does so in a manner similar to many laws;
but until today, none were thought to constitute takings. To
call this sort of governmental action a taking as a matter of
constitutional interpretation is both imprecise and, with all
due respect, unwise.

As the role of Government expanded, our experience
taught that a strict line between a taking and a regulation
is difﬁcult to discern or to maintain. This led the Court in
Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U. S. 393 (1922), to try
to span the two concepts when speciﬁc property was sub-
jected to what the owner alleged to be excessive regulation.
“The general rule at least is, that while property may be
regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far it
Id., at 415. The quoted
will be recognized as a taking.”
sentence is, of course, the genesis of the so-called regulatory
takings doctrine. See Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal
Council, 505 U. S. 1003, 1014 (1992)
(“Prior to Justice
Holmes’s exposition in Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, it
was generally thought that the Takings Clause reached only
a ‘direct appropriation’ of property or the functional equiva-
lent of a ‘practical ouster of [the owner’s] possession’ ” (cita-
tions omitted)). Without denigrating the importance the