Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 2019

Knick v. Township of Scott

588 U.S. 180 | 139 S. Ct. 2162 | 204 L. Ed. 2d 558 | 2019 U.S. LEXIS 4197

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Takeaway

In short, this case ended Williamson County's state-litigation requirement: property owners may bring federal §1983 takings claims as soon as a local government takes property without paying just compensation.

Background

Rose Mary Knick owned 90 rural acres in Scott Township, Pennsylvania, including a small family graveyard. The Township adopted an ordinance requiring all cemeteries, including those on private land, to remain open and accessible to the public during daylight hours. It also authorized Township officers to enter private property to identify cemeteries. After an officer found grave markers on Knick's land, the Township notified her that she was violating the ordinance.

Knick sought declaratory and injunctive relief in Pennsylvania state court, alleging that the ordinance took her property. She did not bring Pennsylvania's inverse-condemnation action seeking compensation. The Township withdrew the violation notice and agreed not to enforce the ordinance while the case proceeded, and the state court declined to grant equitable relief because Knick could not show ongoing irreparable harm.

Knick then sued in federal district court under 42 U.S.C. §1983, alleging a Fifth Amendment taking. The district court dismissed under Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank, which required a property owner to seek compensation through available state procedures before bringing a federal takings claim. The Third Circuit affirmed, while describing the ordinance as extraordinary and constitutionally suspect. The Supreme Court granted review to reconsider Williamson County's state-litigation requirement.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether a property owner must first seek compensation through state inverse-condemnation procedures before bringing a federal Takings Clause claim under §1983.

Holding

No. A government violates the Takings Clause when it takes private property without just compensation, and the owner may bring a §1983 claim in federal court at that time.

Reasoning

The Fifth Amendment says that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. In the majority's view, this language creates a constitutional right to compensation at the time of an uncompensated taking; it does not merely guarantee access to a state procedure that may later yield compensation. A local government's failure to pay therefore completes a constitutional violation that is actionable under §1983.

The Court relied on its federal-takings cases, particularly Jacobs v. United States, which treated the taking itself as the event giving rise to the constitutional claim for compensation. The availability or form of a later remedy does not qualify the underlying Fifth Amendment right. First English likewise recognized the self-executing character of the Takings Clause as to compensation and held that a taking creates a constitutional obligation to pay.

Williamson County's contrary rule effectively imposed an exhaustion requirement on §1983 plaintiffs. That conflicted with the usual rule that a person asserting a federal constitutional right need not first pursue state remedies. The Court rejected the premise that takings plaintiffs should uniquely be compelled to litigate in state court before they can invoke the federal forum Congress provided in §1983.

The Court found Williamson County's authorities unpersuasive. Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto involved a request for equitable relief against a federal statute and a congressionally required administrative process; it did not establish that a State may force exhaustion before a constitutional claim exists. Nor did the Tucker Act analogy help, because a Tucker Act compensation action is itself a Fifth Amendment takings claim, rather than a prerequisite to one.

Prior statements that compensation need not be paid before a taking did not mean that no constitutional violation occurred until a later compensation proceeding failed. Those cases generally denied injunctions because an adequate damages remedy existed. The availability of post-taking compensation ordinarily prevents equitable relief, but it remedies an already complete constitutional violation rather than preventing one from occurring.

The Court stressed the practical distinction between recognizing a claim immediately and requiring the government to pay in advance or halt its activity. Because compensation remedies ordinarily provide an adequate legal remedy, courts generally will not enjoin a government action merely because compensation was not contemporaneous. The decision instead permits an owner to pursue the federal damages remedy immediately after the taking.

Issue #2

Whether stare decisis required retaining Williamson County's state-litigation requirement.

Holding

No. The Court overruled Williamson County's state-litigation requirement.

Reasoning

Williamson County was, in the Court's assessment, exceptionally poorly reasoned and inconsistent with the Court's broader takings doctrine. Its conclusion that no Fifth Amendment claim existed until a state court denied compensation could not be squared with decisions recognizing that the right to compensation arises when the government takes property without paying for it.

The rule was also unworkable. Williamson County expected owners first to litigate a state compensation claim and then, if unsuccessful, to pursue a federal claim. But San Remo Hotel held that federal courts generally must give preclusive effect to the state-court judgment. Thus, an owner who followed Williamson County often lost any meaningful opportunity to litigate the federal claim in federal court—the so-called San Remo preclusion trap.

The Court found no substantial reliance interest favoring retention. Overruling the rule would not create new substantive takings liability or force governments to stop regulating property; it would mainly move claims that otherwise would have been filed as state inverse-condemnation actions into federal court under §1983. Because the case involved constitutional interpretation, stare decisis carried less force than it would in an area Congress could readily revise.

Concurrences

Justice Thomas

Reasoning

Justice Thomas agreed that the Takings Clause is violated when the government takes property without paying just compensation. He wrote separately to emphasize a more textually stringent view: in his view, just compensation is a prerequisite to the government's lawful exercise of eminent domain, not merely a damages remedy for an owner willing to sue after the taking.

He rejected the Federal Government's proposed "sue me" approach, under which an implied promise to pay later would suffice even when officials cannot know in advance whether regulation will effect a taking. If the constitutional requirement of payment before or at the taking makes some regulatory programs difficult to administer, he maintained, courts must still enforce the Clause as written.

Justice Thomas agreed that ordinary remedial principles will often make injunctions unavailable when an adequate damages remedy exists. But he cautioned that the Court's opinion should not foreclose appropriate equitable relief or related common-law tort remedies, such as trespass, when the government repudiates its obligation to pay compensation.

Dissents

Justice Kagan

Reasoning

Justice Kagan argued that the Takings Clause does not prohibit government takings as such; it permits them on the condition that the owner receives just compensation. A constitutional violation therefore requires both a taking and a denial of compensation. If government supplies a reasonable, certain, and adequate procedure through which the owner can obtain full post-taking compensation, including interest, the government has not yet denied compensation and has not violated the Fifth Amendment.

In her view, Williamson County followed more than a century of precedent holding that advance or contemporaneous payment is unnecessary when a reliable post-taking compensation mechanism exists. She rejected the majority's effort to characterize those decisions as merely denying injunctive relief because damages were adequate. The cases, she explained, directly held that delayed payment through an adequate compensation procedure satisfies the Takings Clause; Yearsley, which involved a claim for money damages, especially undermined the majority's account.

Justice Kagan also disputed the majority's reliance on Tucker Act cases and First English. A Tucker Act claim rests on the Fifth Amendment because the Amendment supplies the obligation to compensate, but the availability of that claim prevents a constitutional violation until the government denies the compensation owed. First English, she contended, expressly preserved Williamson County's principle that no constitutional violation occurs until just compensation has been denied.

The dissent warned that the new rule makes government officials constitutional wrongdoers whenever a regulation is later found to have effected a taking, even if the government had a dependable system for paying compensation. Because modern takings doctrine is fact-dependent and does not provide a simple formula for identifying every taking in advance, officials often cannot know beforehand whether a regulation will trigger liability.

Justice Kagan further argued that the ruling undermines judicial federalism by channeling land-use disputes into federal court. Takings claims frequently depend first on difficult state-law questions about whether an owner has a cognizable property interest and what limits state property law already imposes. State courts, rather than federal district courts, are generally better situated to resolve those local property-law questions.

Finally, she concluded that stare decisis strongly supported retaining Williamson County. The San Remo preclusion problem resulted from the interaction of Williamson County with the federal full-faith-and-credit statute, and Congress could amend that statute if it wished to preserve a later federal forum. In her view, disagreement with Williamson County's merits reasoning, without a special justification for overruling precedent, did not warrant discarding a longstanding rule.