Top Court's Less Than Landmark Ruling - Forbes.com

Dan Ackman, writing for Forbes, says that:

NEW YORK - The U.S. Supreme Court is often vested with awesome power--the last word, the final arbiter and all that. Once in a blue moon, that's true, but mostly it's a crock, and the "takings" case the court decided today shows why.

In the case of Kelo v. City of New London, the court ruled 5 to 4 that a city may take control of private homes and use underlying land for an economic revitalization project, provided, of course, that the city pays the home owners "just compensation."

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But the court didn't really decide that the scheme was public. More accurately, it decided that it would not decide, nodding to its "long-standing policy of deference to legislative judgments in this field."...

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Everyone agrees that the state cannot take land to confer purely private benefits. But the "hard question of when a purportedly 'public purpose' taking meets the public-use requirement" really wasn't for the justices to judge, Stevens said.

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Reacting to the decision, Chip Mellor, president of the Institute for Justice, which argued the case for the home owners, seized on this idea that the lower courts hold most of the cards. In a statement, he said, "The majority and the dissent both recognized that the action now turns to state supreme courts, where the public-use battle will be fought out under state constitutions." He added that "today's decision in no way binds those courts."

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Mr. Ackman is swimming against the tide of headlines here. All around the world, it's being interpreted as the United States Supreme Court giving the green light for cities to bulldoze smaller taxpayers to make way for bigger taxpayers. (And, no doubt, in city halls across America there are champagne corks in the wastebaskets tonight, because that's what they think they got told.) But do read Mr. Ackman's take on this. It at least gives us something to fight back with.

Full Ackman article