Blum Collins, the highest quality representation of property owners in disputes involving land or businesses

 

Craig M. Collins and Steven A. Blum have battled against government overreaching by assuring that landowners are justly compensated. Early in his law career, Mr. Blum became interested in the law of government takings and became an adjunct professor of law at Loyola Law School, teaching the law of eminent domain and inverse condemnation. Both Mr. Blum and Mr. Collins practiced at Berger & Norton, a boutique law firm noted for its important precedents in this area of law in the United States and California Supreme Court.

Eminent Domain and Inverse Condemnation

Eminent Domain (or condemnation) is the power to take private property for a necessary public purpose. Federal, state, and local governments and their agencies, and certain public utilities, have the power to condemn private property.

Governments can exercise this power directly by filing a lawsuit to take property. Governments can also take or damage property indirectly – by over-regulating it or when creation of a public project such as a street causes physical damage to neighboring property.

Inverse Condemnation, Physical Takings

Government activities may result in the taking of private property even though there is no formal condemnation. New government rules and regulations, for example, may interfere with the productive use of private property. This interference may constitute a taking in which just compensation must be paid. In these cases, the property owner usually has to sue the offending authority for "inverse condemnation." Many times, floods and earth movement are caused by a public project and one or more government agencies may be liable for the resulting damage.

Over the last thirty years, regulatory agencies empowered by the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, and new governmental agencies like the California Coastal Commission, have sought to control development at the expense of individual landowners. To those persons whose property is seized by eminent domain, the U.S. Constitution says "just compensation" must be paid. But like many rights illuminated by the Constitution, the right to just compensation is often ensured only through litigation.

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