By Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Opinion
columnist April 16, 2018
Susette Kelo's 'Little Pink House' movie shed lights on an
often-ignored subject: Whether or not the government has the right to take your
property.
Like some sort of HGTV
dream, Susette Kelo found a house in the perfect
location and within her budget. She lovingly restored and updated it, and
lived there happily ever after. Well, until she was thrown out, to be
precise. Because it wasn’t an HGTV dream, but an eminent domain
nightmare.
Her “little pink
house” (the color was actually called “Odessa Rose”) was condemned to make
space for an industrial development project. She fought the condemnation
all the way to the Supreme Court but — in what was something
less than the usual rosy Hollywood ending —she lost. Her home was taken,
her neighborhood was demolished, and then, adding insult to injury, the industrial
redevelopment fell through and it turned out to have all been for nothing. . .
.
I was fortunate enough
to get an advance screener, and showed the film, which opens later this week,
to my Constitutional Law class at the University of Tennessee. (You can see a trailer here.) My verdict: Little
Pink House is an outstanding and moving treatment of a legal issue that gets
far too little attention: The extent to which the state can take your property
away just because it thinks it has a better use for it.
The Bill of Rights is
supposed to protect your property. It provides that private property can’t be
taken from its owners except for public use, and with the payment of “just
compensation” to its owners. But the way that both of those concepts have been
applied by the courts is problematic, to say the least.
Few people have
problems with taking private property for obvious public uses like roads,
bridges, or schools. But courts have interpreted “public use” to mean pretty
much anything the government says is for the benefit of the public, or for a
“public purpose.” . . .
Read
the rest at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/16/little-pink-house-susette-kelo-pfizer-supreme-court-column/519093002/
