Articles

Is plowing a field "dredging and filling" under the Clean Water Act? Food and Drug Administration wants Texas business owner to litigate her civil rights case in D.C. Eleventh Circuit vindicates Chmielewski family's property rights PLF urges Supreme Court to take up hair braiders' case Supreme Court strikes down anti-gambling law be ...

Today, Forbes writer George Leef published an article on Brott v. United States, a case before the Supreme Court in which PLF participated as amicus. The Forbes piece discusses PLF's brief and urges the high court to review the unconstitutional practice of denying a jury to victims of federal land grabs. ...

Today, we filed an amicus brief, joined by our friends at Reason and American Civil Rights Union, urging the Supreme Court to grant Brott v. United States, a case about whether property owners are entitled to a jury when the federal government takes their land. If the federal government takes your property, who would you want to decide how much ...

Earlier today, we learned that Florida's Fifth District Court of Appeal reversed a jury award for millions of dollars to a family that had its property rights basically ignored by a small town on Florida's east coast. The family relied upon the town council of Ponce Inlet's invitation to develop several pieces of property at great price, only to ...

Yesterday, the Seattle Times ran my op-ed about our lawsuit challenging a Seattle law that forbids landlords from choosing their own tenants. In Yim v. City of Seattle, we argue that the city has violated due process rights and rights against uncompensated government takings. Seattle's "first in time" rule requires landlords to offer vacant uni ...

caption id="attachment_42229" align="alignright" width="196" We all could use 12 Angry Men on our side when the government takes our stuff/caption Kevin Brott wants a jury trial for his Fifth Amendment claim to just compensation. The federal government converted a portion of Brott's property into a public trail. He wants a jury to gauge compen ...

School choice supported in Montana PLF sued the Montana Department of Revenue to fight a rule that forbids children who want to attend religious school from getting scholarship assistance. In May 2015, Montana became the 43rd state to adopt a school choice law. The law creates a tax incentive for individuals and businesses to donate money t ...

Property rights -- mapping the property away We filed this amicus brief in Kirby v. North Carolina supporting the rights of landowners. In a scenario common in many states, transportation agencies know they will likely be building new roads and highways, they have a pretty good idea where those roads might go, but they don't have the budget or pop ...

Obamacare back to the Supreme Court We filed our petition for cert in Sissel v. United States this week, asking the Supreme Court to take the case.  As our blog explains, when Justice Roberts upheld the law because it was a "tax" and not a "penalty," we realized that if the individual mandate (as well as the other taxes included in Obamacare) wer ...