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For virtually every federal constitutional right where you believe you have a claim, you can file a lawsuit in federal court. But under a 1985 ruling, any claim that your property was taken without just compensation required property owners to file their lawsuit at the state level. To make matters worse, a 2005 case held that if the state court decided again a property owner, the federal court could not overturn that decision. The two cases together meant that no federal court could decide whether the takings clause had been violated.

The Supreme Court recently corrected this in an important property rights case -Knick v. Township of Scott. This 2019 ruling restored the right of property owners to go directly to federal court once they have experienced the unconstitutional taking of their property. You must exhaust your administrative remedies first, but that has always been the case.

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This post was written by Stumpy Harris