The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. July 22, 2019.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse doesn’t like the Supreme Court’s Knick v. Township of Scott decision. (See “Why the ‘Knick’ Ruling Signals a New Day,” NLJ August 2019.) Why? And why should we care about a five-month-old Supreme Court decision? Answer: because he misunderstands what the court did and denigrates the decision as a plot by a cabal of right-wing jurists (he calls them “the Roberts Five”). He could not be more wrong.
All Knick did was cut through a Gordian knot that had barred Americans suffering regulatory takings of their property from receiving judicial redress mandated by the Constitution. Knick overruled the bizarre 1985 Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson City holding that forbade American property owners—and them alone—from suing in federal court to enforce a federal constitutional guarantee. Before Knick, their supposed “remedy” was to sue “first” in state court under state law, but with a bizarre twist: any state court decision would bar them from ever having their federal constitutional claim adjudicated in federal court. Knick confessed that, in so holding, the Supreme Court had “simply” been “confused” when it decided Williamson County, which the court rightly called “exceptionally ill-founded … and unworkable in practice.”
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