United We Stand - uwsboard.com

Thanks for posting this. I had heard about the case but hadn't read up on it.

*Surprise* - nolan's favorite Supreme Court justice wrote the majority opinion in a case, joined by the wise latina, pat the softball player, sleeping baby ruth, and Breyer (he's so unremarkable I can't think of a witty nickname for him).

"In at least some cases, today's indeed ruling allows the government to avoid compensating property owners for the taking of their land, merely because they also own the lot next door," he writes. "But the vague nature of the test established by the Court makes it very hard to figure out exactly when that might happen."

Kennedy can't retire soon enough. It's such a farce that many like to call him the "libertarian" justice. He's anything but aside from liberal social issue cases.

It looks like Kennedy at least limited his ruling to the specific special circumstance where the owners essentially wanted to subdivide their lot and if a similar case comes up again a year from now, the ruling would likely go the other way.

Kennedy says his ruling was only because if you consider both halves of the lot together, they weren't deprived of the economic use of their property. So if you don't have two halves of your property, then his ruling would be inapplicable.

Of course, his ruling is utter nonsense - is he saying that if they sold the cabin and kept the other land, where now they are being deprived of the use of all of their remaining property, they could sue and he would vote in their favor? That seems like a ridiculous definition of constitutionality. If it's unconstitutional to deprive you of the economic use of a whole plat of land, then it's unconstitutional to deprive you of the use of half of it.