Sie sind auf Seite 1von 5
 
 
Viewpoint: Senator is Wrong About 'Knick' Ruling
 
This is not a conservative or liberal issue. It is a question of Constitutional interpretation.
By
Dwight Merriam
 | July 02, 2019 at 12:59 PM
 
Dwight Merriam
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in his recent National Law Journal broadside,
“’Knick’
-
Picking: Why a Recent SCOTUS Ruling Signals a New Day,” goes off
the rails in clai
ming the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in
 
Knick v. Township of Scott
 is the product of five conservative justices ganging up to ignore legal
precedent so as to impose their agenda and of “dark money” funding a
shadowy coalition of groups bent on remaking the court and influencing it to their ends.
 
The plain fact is that
Williamson County v. Hamilton Bank
(1985), the decision the court overruled in
Knick
, was wrongly decided in the first instance and has proved utterly unworkable. This is not a conservative or liberal issue. It is a question of Constitutional interpretation. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution provides that no one should have their “private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” What
 
Knick
does is protect that right by opening the door to the federal courts. The legal construct that
Williamson County
 
created was that a person’s property could not be deemed “taken” by the government and a claim for
compensation justiciable in federal court until they had subjected themselves to a long process in state court to see if the government b forced to pay something for the rights it invaded. In the case of Rose Mary Knick, what her town did was pass a law that said anyone during daylight hours could enter her private farmland where she lives alone to access an old, hardly recognizable small private gravesite 300 yards into her property. Under the doctrine of
Williamson County
 
Mrs. Knick hadn’t
lost anything, at least not yet, even though strangers might wander across her property for years while she sought relief in a state court. Until she was done
in state court, her case was not “ripe” for federal court.
 What
Knick
 
does is make clear that the taking of Mrs. Knick’s property interest
occurred the moment the town ordered her to open her private property to the public and on that day she ought to have the right to go to federal court to get relief from the violation of her rights under the federal Constitution. Where else should a property owner be able to get relief under the Bill of Rights than in federal court?

Ihre Neugier belohnen

Alles, was Sie lesen wollen.
Jederzeit. Überall. Auf jedem Gerät.
Keine Verpflichtung. Jederzeit kündbar.
576648e32a3d8b82ca71961b7a986505