Articles

caption id="" align="alignright" width="567" Is this navigable? An exposed permafrost layer -- considered to be a "water of the United States" by the Corps of Engineers. Permafrost underlies roughly 85% of Alaska's 663,300 square miles./caption PLF asks Supreme Court to hear Alaska permafrost case This week, PLF filed a petition asking the ...

Supreme Court goes squishy on property rights Free speech includes freedom to insult Free speech means letting high school kids be high school kids Howling at the wolf listing Doing time even if you didn't know you committed the crime  Washington appellate court rules that property is not protected by the constitution End-run aroun ...

One thing that nearly all Californians agree on is that the price of housing in this state is too high. The relentlessly rising prices are unmistakable evidence of a housing shortage: not enough homes are built to meet the rising demand. Husband and wife entrepreneurs Shelah and Jonathan Lehrer-Graiwer thought they could help meet that demand when ...

Next Tuesday, May 31, the California Court of Appeal will hear argument over the legality of Plan Bay Area -- the plan to restrict future development in all but a tiny fraction of the already incredibly expensive Bay Area. The Court will consider whether regional agencies were free to ignore the plan's significant environmental consequences and the ...

The Fifth Amendment requires the government to compensate a property owner when it takes property from a private landowner. To get around the requirement of paying "just compensation," government entities often get creative. One trick is to depress property values prior to taking the land by excessively regulating land or by announcing an intent to ...

caption id="attachment_33463" align="alignright" width="225" Community supports the Flash Beach Grille/caption Last week, my Pacific Legal Foundation colleague, Christina Martin, blogged about the PLF's new lawsuit against Martin County, Florida.  Pacific Legal has asked the state circuit court to declare that Martin County's government is ill ...

The Montana Property Rights Conference will take place next week, on August 14 and August 15, at the Northern Hotel in Billings, Montana.  As a keynote speaker, I will open the conference at 1:00 p.m. with a discussion of environmental and land-use issues, including PLF's United States Supreme Court win last year in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water ...

In 1945, Friedrich Hayek wrote an essay explaining why central planners were doomed to fail at economic planning. I saw this essay come to life recently during a county commission hearing in Florida.  The commission is in the midst of making its long term land-use plans for the county, so it hired a company to research how to aid economic growth w ...

On Tuesday, the city council of Newport Beach (California) voted against a resolution supporting additional state funding for the California Coastal Commission.  The Commission---which regulates coastal property owners' use of their lands with an iron fist---has for years been complaining about its lack of resources and staffing levels.  Conse ...