Wordsmith wrote:
The "greater good" of whom? The benefits are going to the corporation
who the government seized the property for, e. g. Wal-Mart.


If you feel that emiment domain powers of the state are wrong, then you
can't agree with this decision at all. But you also have a couple of
hundred years of law against you.

But I don't think this case is not a sweeping as it is being reported.

-- When land is taken for "public use," it does not mean that the
government has to take title and keep the land for "public access."
"Public use" does not equal "public access."

-- This is hardly the first time that private land has been condemned
by state or local government and transferred from one private owner to
another. The court heavily cited a Hawaii case that did just that,
though for different reasons, on a huge scale.

-- The New London, CT case was not a case of a developer coming to
town with an idea to make money and going to the city to take the
property. The order in which things were done, and who did them were
key to this court decision.

New London has been designated a economically distressed city. The
city created a nonprofit redevelopment agency to look at ways to
revitalize the city's economy. This development idea was one of the
things they came up. The developer was picked from a group that
applied to create what the city authorized the redevelopment agency to
do.

-- The owners of the land are compensated as they are under all
eminent domain condemnations. This was a minority of property owners
that didn't want to sell (a couple of them were not residents, they
were investors that owned rental property that was targeted).

-- This is not a case where the U.S. Supreme Court undid something by
overturning lower courts. The first trial court granted some relief,
in the form of a restraining order, to some of the plaintiffs, but most
of the property owners lost at the original trial. When the plaintiffs
applealed to get more relief in the Connecticut courts, they lost again
- they all lost. This went to the Connecticut Supreme Court where the
property owners lost again. Then it went to the U.S. Supreme court
where the final word was the city acted legally.

-- The SCOTUS considered some of the hypthetical scenerios that people
came up with, like the notion that private developers would have Carte
Blanche to come into a town wanting to build something and the city
could give them land if all they do is say it will increase tax
revenue. In a nutshell, the court answered by saying, "That isn't what
happened here," and were very clear that if it had been the case, they
probably would have ruled differently.

-- The SCOTUS clearly stated that the decision did not prevent states
from enacting laws or state constitutional provisions that made it
harder for their local governments to condemn property. This decision
was based soley on the 5th ammendment question - not whether the city
or state had violated Connecticut law.