Articles

Author: Joshua Thompson PLF Clients George and Sharlee McNamee will appear on the show Fox & Friends tomorrow morning, February 24, at 5:44 a.m., PST.  The McNamees own a beachfront home along Corona Del Mar Beach in Newport Beach, California.  They have lived there for about three decades.  The McNamees, like thei ...

Property Rights — Taking by Flooding Earlier this week, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals issued its remand decision in Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States, upholding the trial court’s conclusion that the Army Corps of Engineers took Arkansas Game & Fish’s property.  This was the case where the Supreme Cou ...

I will be a guest on KQED Public Radio’s Forum on Monday, February 10, from 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.  KQED is San Francisco’s NPR affiliate, which broadcasts throughout Northern California. Listen on 88.5 FM or Comcast channel 960 in San Francisco, 89.3 FM in Sacramento, 88.3 FM in Santa Rosa and 88.1 FM in Martinez. We’ll ̷ ...

On Monday, July 14, at 9:00 a.m., I will be in the California Court of Appeal (San Diego) arguing an appeal brought by the California Coastal Commission in Lynch v. California Coastal Commission.  At stake is two Encinitas families’ right to repair a private beach staircase destroyed by storms, and to install (and keep) a state-of-the-art ...

One of California’s most controversial land-use disputes  is over Martins Beach, in Half Moon Bay. The fight is over public access to the popular beach–and whether one man’s private property rights can survive a fierce backlash from well-funded and powerful interests groups.  I wrote about the facts of the case here. The contr ...

On Sunday, the Sacramento Bee published my opinion editorial on the Martins Beach controversy, including legislative efforts to cow one landowner into giving up his property rights. PLF attorneys are following the dispute closely, and they will support the property owner as a friend-of-the-court in an appeal from a San Mateo Superior Court ruling t ...

Yesterday, a San Mateo Superior Court judge issued a stunning tentative ruling in one of the two Martins Beach lawsuits pending against coastal landowner Vinod Khosla. The judge concluded that the decision to disallow the public to trespass onto private property–after allowing the public to do so for a fee–constitutes “de ...

Today, the California Court of Appeal issued a published decision ruling in favor of PLF client, SDS Family Trust, in its years-long battle against the California Coastal Commission. The case involves the constitutionality of a public-access easement that the Commission demanded as a condition of the family’s modest restoration of its home ...

Last month, we reported on PLF’s big win against the California Coastal Commission, when the California Court of Appeal unanimously ruled that three sisters could rehabilitate their old ranch house without having to dedicate a mile-long public-access easement across the shoreline of their property.  The court held that the easement exacti ...