In Manatt Appellate Senior Counsel Michael Berger’s latest column for Daily Journal, he explored the growing number of land use cases involving excessive delay and how the U.S. Supreme Court is working to eliminate various types of delays in takings litigation.
In the article, Berger analyzed several cases that address needless delays as they worked their way through both state and federal courts. He explained the background of why regulatory takings cases could not be filed in federal court until they had first been litigated and lost in state court, and noted, after overruling its own precedents that had barred access to the federal courts, that a more recent push for abstention in the federal courts arose to take its place as the roadblock. “Surely, both government counsel who seek abstention orders and the courts that grant them are aware that they are simply substituting one way of precluding federal litigation for another,” he wrote. A petition is pending in the Supreme Court to resolve the issue and guarantee access.
Daily Journal subscribers can read the full article here.