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 ...

Author:  Anne Hayes Starting today, Flag Day, and ending on Independence Day, the 4th of July, Pacific Legal Foundation invites you to enter our contest to tell us what Freedom means to you. Every day, PLF takes cases from American citizens who are trying to do something simple–start a business, build a home, get a building ...

Six years ago PLF filed its complaint in federal court in Severance v. Patterson, a case challenging Texas’ policy of instantly converting private beachfront land into public property when storms move the vegetation line inland, and turn private parcels into “dry beaches.” In 2009, the 5th circuit ruled that Texas’  � ...

The Corpus Christi Caller-Times has this nice article on PLF’s recent victory in Severance v. Patterson.  Here’s a snippet: In March, the Texas Supreme Court, in a 5-3 opinion, ruled that public beach easements don’t move in avulsive events, such as hurricanes, that reshape the coastline overnight. Easements shift only slowly, as ...

South Carolina’s legislature is looking for ways to protect its wetlands from development by increasing a deed tax to fund the purchase of development rights to vital wetlands. Although problematic in other ways, such an approach is preferable to the government’s usual tactic of increasing regulations on private property owners, not onl ...

The Wall Street Journal recently published an interesting article that considers whether concert tickets are property.  The philosophical question has practical implications, as California lawmakers are considering whether to ban paperless tickets, which can only be redeemed with proof of identification.  Paperless tickets are meant to curb scal ...

PLF continues to make headway in its twin goals of protecting property rights on the beach and in opening the federal courthouse doors to property owners seeking to defend their constitutionally protected property rights. The latest example of this reality is a new victory in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in (another) case pitting … ...

Last week, the internet was buzzing about high school history textbooks that diminish or mis-characterize the Second Amendment.  What some of those reports have not mentioned, however, is that the same books fail to even mention that the Bill of Rights protects private property from government theft. One book, The Americans, a history book for &# ...

Today, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued a favorable published decision in Sherman v. Town of Chester, a case in which PLF filed an amicus brief.  In the case, a New York Town gave a property owner the run-around on his development plans for a decade, changing the rules every time he presented a plan for formal … ...