'Eminent domain' becoming eminently despotic
Soon — perhaps on the first Monday in October — the court will announce whether it will hear an appeal against a 4-3 ruling last March by Connecticut's Supreme Court. That ruling effectively repeals a crucial portion of the Bill of Rights. If you think the term "despotism" exaggerates what this repeal permits, consider the life-shattering power wielded by the government of New London, Conn.
That city, like many cities, needs more revenues. To enhance the Pfizer pharmaceutical company's $270 million research facility, it empowered a private entity, the New London Development Corporation, to exercise the power of eminent domain to condemn most of the Fort Trumbull neighborhood along the Thames River. The aim is to make space for upscale condominiums, a luxury hotel and private offices that would yield the city more tax revenues than can be extracted from the neighborhood's middle-class homeowners.
But the Fifth Amendment says, inter alia: "nor shall private property be taken for public use , without just compensation" (emphasis added). Every state constitution also stipulates takings only for "public use." The framers of the Bill of Rights used language carefully; clearly they intended the adjective "public" to restrict government takings to uses that are directly owned or primarily used by the general public, such as roads, bridges or public buildings.
The Connecticut court, like the courts of six other states, says the "public use" restriction does not really restrict takings at all: It merely means a taking must have some anticipated public benefit, however indirect and derivative, at the end of some chain of causation. Hence New London can evict Wilhelmina Dery from the home in which she has lived since her birth there in 1918.
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