It’s rare when a NY judge, after the great Robert Yates, gives a libertarian anything to cheer about, but Justice James M. Catterson recently delivered a rousing rebuke of Columbia’s attempt to use eminent domain to seize private property on the Upper West Side.
The Court held that aiding a college is not a public use sufficient to invoke eminent domain and that the blight used to justify the seizure was in fact manufactured by Columbia’s own neglect of the properties it had acquired. Judge Catterson started his opinion with a dramatic quote from Calder v. Bull, 1798: “A law that takes property from A and gives it to B . . . is against all reason and justice.”
10:25 pm on December 14, 2009
