Source: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/land_use/2018/07/index.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 12:49:06+00:00

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The Sustainable Development Code is a model local code providing the best sustainability practices to local governments. The Code focuses on local development practices that implicate a wide array of sustainability issues, including climate change, wildlife habitats, water quality, and affordable housing.
I am co-managing the Code with the University of Colorado at Denver, School of Architecture and Planning. We are working with practitioners, academics, and students from around the country.
Would you be interested in incorporating drafting Code provisions into your environmental, land use, energy law, water law, or state and local government course, as was done at several law schools last semester. Overwhelmingly, the response from those that have incorporated the Code into their courses has been that it provides excellent educational opportunities to understand local environmental issues, local regulations, and, more generally, federalism and decentralization. In addition, it is a good chance for students to hone their researching and writing skills.
4-6 additional local code citations and parentheticals with similar recommendations.
Drafting the briefs has been primarily incorporated into coursework. The idea is that the briefs will provide local governments with quick and easily accessible information that can be used to enact local legislation. The briefs were designed by a multidisciplinary group of experts and practitioners (a list of the Advisory Committee can be found in the prezi presentation). I’m glad to forward sample briefs.
I will make myself fully available to anyone interested in this project. We expect to launch the Code in summer/fall 2019.
I hope this project interests you and, if so, please contact me.
While Stephen and Jonathan explore upcoming cases and concepts, my focus here is on the fundamental aspects of takings cases. I find that the basics are tough and need a patient hand to be turned so that students truly understand constitutionally protected property rights and remedies for their violation. I spend a lot of time on Lingle, which, along with Palazzolo, handle the basics well.
In Lingle, the majority dispenses with the two-part, disjunctive Agins test, including the incomprehensible notion that a regulation can be a taking if fails to substantially advance legitimate state interests. “Correcting course,” Mrs. Justice O’Connor, writing for the majority, properly characterizes that test as a due process standard. Understanding due process claims is as critical for students as understanding takings jurisprudence. Many, many of the cases in our book are disposed of on due process grounds, beginning with Euclid. These waters should not be cloudy and Lingle does an excellent job of separating due process from takings cases and explaining the prevailing rules of interpretation in each category.
The district court decision in Lingle held that a taking occurred because it found Chevron’s economist more credible than the state’s expert who argued that no state interest was advanced by the state’s control of rents charged to lessee-dealers by oil companies. It reasoned that the substantially advance test of Agins was violated because the law was ineffective and that a taking had occurred, even though no damages were proved.
This is a can of worms. If there are no damages, what is the remedy if the Constitution provides that just compensation must be paid for the taking by the offending regulating entity? What does the Constitution mean when it says no person shall be deprived of property without due process of law? How is that different from the provision that protects private property from being taken for a public use, without just compensation? What is a court doing choosing the plaintiff’s expert over the one relied on by the state legislature, to which it owes deference?. In addition to dispensing with the substantially advance rule for takings, O’Connor also reminds us that courts do not heavily scrutinize substantive due process challenges to government regulation?
Having clarified takings waters this much, the Justice further explains that there are four categories of takings including per se cases like Loretto and Lucas (“two relatively narrow categories”) and Penn Central, which articulates specific factors for resolving regulatory takings claims that do not fall within the other categories. The fourth type of takings case she mentions is “the special context of land-use exactions” that arise mostly in context of conditions imposed by adjudicatory bodies, like planning boards, as part of the project review and approval process. Although Koontz rendered this fourth category fundamentally cloudy, the categories themselves are clear enough to guide law students’ understanding of this field of law.
In explaining the Penn Central factors, Justice O’Connor refers us to the Court’s 2001 Palazzolo case, in which a developer was approved to build one residence on two dryland acres in a 20 acre tidal wetland site that he owned. He had asked the relevant agency for permission to build 74 homes on individual lots and claimed damages of over $3 million, which he claimed constituted a total taking under Lucas. The Court disagreed finding that “the petitioner failed to establish a deprivation of all economic value [one of the Penn Central factors] for it is undisputed that the parcel retains significant worth for the construction of a residence.” In other words, the Court considered the Lingle takings categories and placed this in the Penn Central rather than Lucas bucket. On remand, the Rhode Island Superior Court affirmed that there was no taking -- under Lucas there was no total taking and under Penn Central the petitioner’s investment backed expectations were not frustrated.
If students can be taught this much, they will know more than land use attorneys who advise their clients that regulations that prevent the highest and best use of their properties are takings or that simple diminution of property values caused by regulations should be actionable under the takings clause. Unfortunately there are too many such cases, suggesting that lawyers don’t understand the basics or are misrepresenting the law to their frustrated clients.
The ninth edition of Land Use and Sustainable Development Law, is now available for the 2018-19 academic year. Feel free to contact any of the co-authors if you would like to discuss the book--or just teaching land use law in general.
Continuing Stephen’s line of inquiry, another hot topic in takings jurisprudence is whether a takings claim may be recognized against a local government for failing to adapt to climate change. Once the students review most of Chapter 5, I might ask them whether attorneys representing local governments should counsel those governments on potential takings claims based on the failure to adapt to climate change. While yet decided, these claims may have the capacity to result in massive damage awards and to encourage local action.
Inaction Claims: Takings claims against governments for failing to take action to adapt to climate change.
Ineffective Action: Takings claims against governments for taking adaptive actions that were insufficient to prevent property loss.
Counterproductive Action: Takings claims against governments for taking action that not only was ineffective in preventing property loss, but also caused greater losses than otherwise would have occurred.
Improper Diversion: Takings claims against governments for diverting the effects of climate change, such as flooding or fire, from one area/community to another, such that the latter area/community incurred greater property losses than it otherwise would have incurred, although the former area/community incurred less loss then it otherwise would have.
Id. at 285-86 (relying heavily on another excellent article, Christopher Serkin, Passive Takings: The State's Affirmative Duty to Protect Property, 113 Mich. L. Rev. 345 (2014) (Serkin argued that “passive takings” liability should be recognized whether a government acts or fails to act when it asserts regulatory control such that it is responsible for harm in the face of ecological change)).
Dana’s four potential takings claims set up a nice intellectual exercise for the students to explore the contours of the takings clause and whether it could fit a claim based on adaptation (Dana is skeptical of whether local action will change in the face of such a takings finding, see Dana, supra, at Section II). Compared to recent successes under federal substantive due process and public trust, see Juliana v. U.S., 217 F.Supp.3d 1224 (2016) (denying defendants’ and intervenors’ motions to dismiss), denying mandamus,In re U.S. v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for the Dist. Of Oregon, 884 F.3d 830 (2018), plaintiffs still, I think, have a way to go before not only finding success under the takings clause, but also encouraging or compelling local action on climate adaptation. Nonetheless, it is a developing area of takings jurisprudence and offers a good opportunity for students to explore the application of takings to new circumstances.
As a callous and inept federal administration fails to protect communities from a rapidly changing environment, local communities continue to suffer (see one of many federal administrative actions abandoning communities battling climate change, see, e.g. Christopher Flavelle, U.S. Disbands Group That Prepared Cities for Climate Shocks, Bloomberg (Dec. 4, 2017)). If local governments fail to address more-and-more foreseeable uncertain disasters, citizens will look for a remedy. And local governments just may be in the crosshairs.
We are back from a summer break and continuing our series on contemporary issues in teaching land use, which follows the general arc of our new casebook. In this set of questions, we dive into takings, which is also the basis of Chapter 5 of the book.
In many ways, takings is probably the one thing students know will be covered in a land use law class. Professors can choose how much they want to emphasize the subject, however. A bread-and-butter approach would focus on the general categories of takings that you could find in any land use law book.
(1) Whether the Supreme Court should reconsider the portion of Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank that requires property owners to exhaust state court remedies to ripen federal takings claims; and (2) whether Williamson County’s ripeness doctrine bars review of takings claims that assert that a law causes an unconstitutional taking on its face, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 3rd, 6th, 9th and 10th Circuits hold, or whether facial claims are exempt from Williamson County, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 1st, 4th and 7th Circuits hold.
While land use profs might have glossed over Williamson County in the past, they might choose to assign it this year in light of Knick.
. . . Our precedents in Nollan v. California Coastal Comm’n, 483 U.S. 825, 107 S.Ct. 3141, 97 L.Ed.2d 677 (1987), and Dolan v. City of Tigard, 512 U.S. 374, 114 S.Ct. 2309, 129 L.Ed.2d 304 (1994), would have governed San Jose’s actions had it imposed those conditions through administrative action. . . .
For at least two decades, however, lower courts have divided over whether the Nollan/Dolan test applies in cases where the alleged taking arises from a legislatively imposed condition rather than an administrative one. See Parking Assn. of Georgia, Inc. v. Atlanta, 515 U.S. 1116, 1117, 115 S.Ct. 2268, 132 L.Ed.2d 273 (1995) (THOMAS, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari). That division shows no signs of abating. The decision below, for example, reiterated the California Supreme Court’s position that a legislative land-use measure is not a taking and survives a constitutional challenge so long as the measure bears “a reasonable relationship to the public welfare.” 61 Cal.4th, at 456–459, and n. 11, 189 Cal.Rptr.3d 475, 351 P.3d, at 987–990, n. 11; compare ibid. with, e.g., Home Builders Assn. of Dayton and Miami Valley v. Beavercreek, 89 Ohio St.3d 121, 128, 729 N.E.2d 349, 356 (2000) (applying the Nollan/Dolan test to legislative exaction).
I continue to doubt that “the existence of a taking should turn on the type of governmental entity responsible for the taking.” Parking Assn. of Georgia, supra, at 1117–1118, 115 S.Ct. 2268.
Given that the Court may well have a more conservative future, it will be interesting to see if this question about the character of governmental action should matter in takings analysis comes back in the coming years.

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