Articles

"They're bank robbers"

November 19, 2009 | By PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION

Author:  Steven Gieseler The New York Daily News offers this update on the controversial Atlantic Yards eminent domain project, aimed at taking private property to build a Brooklyn arena for the New Jersey Nets. … ...

Articles

Supreme Court won't vacate NYC rent controls

April 23, 2012 | By PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION

WASHINGTON, D.C.; April 23, 2012: The U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it will not hear Harmon v. Kimmel, a suit targeting New York City’s rent stabilization law as a violation of the Fifth Amendment ban on the uncompensated taking of private property. As the nation’s leading legal watchdog organization for property rights, Pacif ...

Articles

Government impounds car for giving free rides to cancer patients

July 07, 2014 | By JONATHAN WOOD

The government’s protection of the taxi cartel has always been reprehensible. State and local governments bar entry into this industry in order to drive up prices and protect existing taxi companies from competition. As a consequence, entrepreneurs, particularly immigrant entrepreneurs, are denied their right to earn a living and pursue their ...

Articles

Mixed week for liberty in the taxi industry

July 24, 2014 | By JONATHAN WOOD

Congratulations to our friends at the Institute for Justice who, due to a legal victory last year, saw Milwaukee eliminate its cap on the number of taxi licenses available. As Reason reports, this has an incredibly significant impact on the taxi industry. Under the cap, licenses had a nominal cost of $85. But, because so … ...

Articles

NY and NJ courts both reject property rights

January 22, 2015 | By MARK MILLER

Property owners in New York and New Jersey learned again this week that their state courts often reject property rights in favor of creative ways to take private property in a manner that violates the Fifth Amendment. In New York, the court upended a centuries-old settled question of law in the case of Friends of Thayer Lake, LLC v. Phil Brow ...

Articles

If they can take your property there, they'll take it anywhere…

February 05, 2016 | By MARK MILLER

In 1851, the Civil War had yet to start. Abraham Lincoln was a country lawyer from Illinois. And Dr. Benjamin Brandreth, patriarch of the Brandreth family, bought a plot of land from the State of New York that included non-navigable waterways. The Brandreth family—a bit larger than in 1851, but the familial descendants of that … ...

Articles

Highest court of New York strikes a blow for property rights

May 20, 2016 | By MARK MILLER

Earlier this month, the New York Court of Appeals handed a victory to New York landowners. PLF proudly supported the landowners who brought the case, and we want to highlight this victory for property rights in a state that often does not recognize them as it should. In a short opinion, the highest court of … ...

Articles

Recent threats to the First Amendment and short-term rentals

June 30, 2016 | By CALEB TROTTER

It should come as no surprise that governments struggle to regulate the disruptive nature of the “sharing economy.” Lately, this struggle has resulted in increasingly burdensome regulations on property owners renting their property short-term, and on the websites like Airbnb and VRBO that provide a platform to list those properties for ...