Opinion ID: 620822
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: Accrued Cause of Action

Text: Plaintiffs, at some junctures, have maintained that their Measure 37 property interest is an accrued cause of action that has been unconstitutionally taken from them by Measure 49. We have squarely held that although a cause of action is a species of property, a party's property right in any cause of action does not vest until a final unreviewable judgment is obtained. Ileto v. Glock, Inc., 565 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir.2009) (quoting Lyon v. Agusta S.P.A., 252 F.3d 1078, 1086 (9th Cir.2001) (internal quotation marks omitted)); see also Fields v. Legacy Health Sys., 413 F.3d 943, 956 (9th Cir.2005) (Causes of action are a species of property protected by the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. However, a party's property right in any cause of action does not vest until a final unreviewable judgment is obtained.) (citation, internal quotation marks, and emphasis omitted). The reason an accrued cause of action is not a vested property interest for Takings Clause purposes until it results in a final unreviewable judgment, is that it is inchoate and does not provide a certain expectation in that property interest. Id. (citing Austin v. City of Bisbee, 855 F.2d 1429, 1435 (9th Cir.1988) (explaining that, although a cause of action is a species of property, it is inchoate and affords no definite or enforceable property right until reduced to final judgment (internal quotation marks omitted))). As we held in the previous interlocutory appeal in the Citizens case, the waivers provided under Measure 37 were administrative decisions, not court judgments. Citizens for Constitutional Fairness v. Jackson Cnty., 388 Fed.Appx. at 711. The question, then, is whether those decisions imparted a certainty that property owners were entitled to a particular use of their property, to compensation, or to some other property interest cognizable under the Takings Clause. Cf. Engquist, 478 F.3d at 1003. We conclude that they did not. The waivers stated that particular land use regulations would not be applied, but this statement did not entitle waiver recipients to develop their property in any particular way. Any development required approval from the requisite governmental bodies as well as, in many, if not all, cases, a waiver from the state of Oregon. Indeed, all of the waivers in the record state that Jackson County does not promise Claimant(s) that Claimant(s) will eventually be able to put the property to any particular use. [4] Further, the waivers were not self-enforcing. They did not, for example, specify a particular amount of compensation to be paid if a municipality continued to apply a waived land use regulation. Instead, in such a circumstance, a property owner's only recourse was a cause of action in Oregon state court. Thus, Plaintiffs here had, at most, a cause of action, not a final judgment. Their right to sue was therefore not a property interest protected by the Takings Clause.