June 3, 2013
In May of 2011, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers breached a levy along the Mississippi River as part of a plan to reduce flooding near Cairo, Illinois. The result was a flood that temporarily blanketed the plaintiffs’ farmland. But when the farmers sued for just compensation, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims—relying heavily on the Federal Circuit’s opinion in Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States—dismissed the takings case. Although the CFC acknowledged that “[i]t is well-settled that government-induced flooding can give rise to a physical taking,” the farmers’ “allegations of two floods separated by nearly 75 years are not enough to support an inference of frequent and inevitably recurring flooding” to amount to a taking.
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May 31, 2013
In United States v. Estate of E. Wayne Hage, the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada held that the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management arbitrarily denied the Defendant Hage, a Nevada ranching family, its long-held grazing permits on federal land. Of particular significance, the court held that there are property rights in federal grazing permits that are entitled to protection under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
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