Court Opinion

ID: 9448759
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 23:44:32.34379+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:32.903390
License: Public Domain

JOHN R. BROWN, Circuit Judge
(concurring specially).
I concur fully in the decision and opinion, but I would emphasize some matters.
Smith owned his land. That ownership included access to it by the road network. The taking did several things. It took the 60 acres, leaving the peninsula. The taking of the 60 acres leaving this peninsula was the first of a planned and inevitable multi-step acquisition which contemplated that the 60 acres was to be substantially inundated. The taking in this fashion therefore contemplated that while a roadway would still run across the 28-acre tract, it was now useless as it led only from water to water. That was known at the time the formal declaration of taking was filed. And, of course, all this had become a fait ac-compli when Smith’s case was heard.
It is true, as Chief Judge TUTTLE points out, that we held in United States v. Brondum, 5 Cir., 1959, 272 F.2d 642, that a Court cannot compel the Government to take (and thus pay for) an estate not described. But this case certainly does not support the proposition that the Government, knowing that it will, and will have to, effectually destroy an existing valuable right in land, may escape the obligation to pay for it in that multi-step proceeding by a cunning, crafty drafting of a declaration which ostensibly excludes it. In Brondum the District Court sustained the landowner’s contention that the declaration took an avigation easement. The Government contended, and we agreed, that there was a distinction between the rights enjoyable under an avigation easement as distinguished from a clearance or obstruction easement. The Government simply did not want an avigation easement. Construing the declaration we simply held that the Government could take the lesser without claiming (or having) the present right to enjoy the greater. Additionally, on the basis of the record as it then existed, it was entirely conceivable that in the proposed use of the limited right acquired, the flight of airplanes never would amount to an invasion, or taking, of the right to fly over the property. Here, however, the formal *60exclusion of “ * * * existing easements for public roads * * * ” was, and was known to be, of paper value only. Use of such, terminology might be helpful in an effort to keep things neat and orderly. But the attempted formal exclusion could not make the taking or the undisputed intended taking anything less than everything which Smith had. What he had, of course, was highway access to the land forming the peninsula. That was, and was intended to be, lost once the Government commenced this multi-step but single comprehensive condemnation.
The Government may not, therefore, destroy this right without paying for it. It may not escape paying for it in the pending proceeding by insisting that the citizen undertake the formidable effort of a suit in a strange Court far from his home which, even under its recently amended Rules, operates under a highly technical procedure in the course of processing cases before a Commissioner for ultimate determination by the Court without a jury. See 28 U.S.C.A. § 2503; Amended Rules, 1957, Court of Claims, 28 U.S.C.A. 1961 Pocket Part.
We are committed to the proposition that statutes relating to governmental acquisition of property inevitably carry constitutional overtones and must be construed in such light. Bishop v. United States, 5 Cir., 1961, 288 F.2d 525, 527-528.
It would be surprising — if not downright frightening — to say that by the declaration of taking Act Congress meant to put within the hands of the Department of Justice the power to chop up a single acquisition into little paper bits, and thereby either obtain property without Fifth Amendment just compensation or subject the citizen to two or more trials in two or more courts in two or more places.
Our decision achieves justice by fulfilling the historical imperatives of the Fifth Amendment. Congress could have meant no less.