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Thursday, July 27, 2006

Law - More on: Ohio Supreme Court issues long awaited eminent domain ruling today

Updating this ILB entry from yesterday, today the Cincinnati Enquirer reports:

Property rights advocates hailed Wednesday's Ohio Supreme Court ruling - striking down the city of Norwood's use of eminent domain for a developer - as a victory for property owners in Norwood, in Ohio and across the nation.

But the three Norwood property owners who took their case to the state's highest court may have won the war but lost the battle.

Joseph P. Horney, the lead plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case, triumphantly forced open the temporary fencing Wednesday that surrounds what's left of the neighborhood, an 11-acre site. Once inside, he looked around and said, "It's painful to see the neighborhood. There's not much left of it."

Horney and his former neighbors - the Gamble and Burton families - are so far sticking to their position that their three-year property rights campaign was about principle, not price.

But what they fought for seems almost uninhabitable, surrounded by a desolate field of weeds and the drone of highway traffic.

For now, they're content with being at the forefront of what seems to be a national property rights backlash in the wake of last year's U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Kelo v. New London.

In that case, the court held that there's nothing unconstitutional about a government taking private property solely for economic development. But the court left it to state courts to decide whether such takings violate state constitutions, and that's what the Ohio Supreme Court did Wednesday.

The Norwood case was the first major eminent-domain case argued and decided by a state supreme court since Kelo.

In ruling that Ohio cities cannot take property by eminent domain solely for economic development, the seven Ohio Supreme Court justices upended a developer's plans to build a $125 million shopping center and office complex on what used to be a residential neighborhood.

The ruling also heartened property rights groups across the country, who tried to make Ohio the first battleground of what could be a series of state-by-state challenges to eminent-domain laws.

Here is a story from today's NY Times, headlined "Ohio Supreme Court Rejects Taking of Homes for Project."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 27, 2006 09:40 AM
Posted to General Law Related