Articles

The dry beach takings case of Nies v.Town of Emerald Isle, described more fully here, continues to generate debate in North Carolina. Recently, the Manager of Defendant Town of Emerald Isle published an article criticizing the Nies' s view of the case. The following PLF rebuttal to the Town Manager's column was published Sunday, August 21, 2016 in ...

In Michigan, when landowners fail to pay their property taxes, local governments take the property, sell it, and keep all the profits—no matter how small the debt or how valuable the property. As a result, local governments are profiting handsomely over the misfortune of their residents. For example, a few years ago, Wayside Church lost a piece of ...

caption id="attachment_41480" align="alignright" width="229" Government won't pay the Murrs after taking the family's lot on the left because the family also owns the lot on the right./caption Many briefs filed in Murr at the Supreme Court After we filed our opening brief in Murr v. Wisconsin, we received a large number of amicus briefs in su ...

Today, the North Carolina Supreme Court agreed to review the case of Nies v. Town of Emerald Isle, a beach property rights dispute pitting a couple's right to limit access to their beachfront land against a local government's desire to open it up the land to public and town driving. The case arises from Emerald Isle, a barrier island on North Caro ...

This week, after 22 years of litigation, the St. Johns River Water Management District finally paid the Koontz family for taking the use of Coy Koontz's property. This case began in 1994, when the St. Johns River Water Management District told Koontz that if he wanted a permit to build on 3.7 acres of his vacant property, he would have to dedica ...

On December 9, 2015, PLF attorneys asked the North Carolina Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeals'  published decision in Nies v. Town of Emerald Isle. In that case, described more fully here, the Court of Appeals concluded, for the first time in state history, that the public and government may enter and occupy  privately owned dry sand bea ...

On November 15, The Washington Post ran an essay that Todd Gaziano and I wrote, urging the District of Columbia to do the right thing and pay for the property it took from DC's most vulnerable citizens.  As I explained last week on the Liberty Blog, until recently, DC used an outrageous tax foreclosure law to take homes over relatively small debts. ...

Monday, the Federal Circuit issued a very good decision for property rights in Lost Tree Village Corp. v. United States. In this case, Lost Tree Village Corp. (Lost Tree) wanted to build a residential development on about five acres of land in Florida. The developer got all of the necessary permits from state and local government. But a federal ag ...

In Nies v. Town of Emerald Isle, PLF attorneys represent North Carolina property owners whose dry beach front land has been converted into a roadway for Town and public vehicles by Town laws. The owners -- the Nies -- sued the Town of Emerald Isle, asserting that it had unconstitutionally taken their property by authorizing an ongoing vehicle invas ...