Property Rights and the Economy of Nature: Understanding Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council

Abstract

There was every reason to expect 1992 to be a year of dramatic change in the constitutional law of takings. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari to four cases involving takings issues, each of which could have led to major revisions in takings jurisprudence. In PFZ Properties, Inc. v. Rodriguez, 1 a Puerto Rican land developer claimed that the government had effectively denied him the right to use his property through its delay and evasiveness in acting on his permit application. The Court could have used Rodriguez to define constitutional limits on anti-development tactics, but instead it dismissed the writ following oral argument.2 General Motors Corp. v. Romein3 involved a regulatory law which upset contractual arrangements between an employer and its employees regarding workers' compensation benefits. While it appeared that the Court might revisit the retroactivity doctrine, instead it affirmed the validity of retroactive economic regulation, just as it has done several times in recent years.4 Retroactivity doctrine is important to takings cases because it potentially limits the application of new regulatory standards to existing contractual relationships such as that of employer and employee. Yee v. City of Escondido5 concerned the validity of a rent control ordinance applied to rentals of mobile home pads.6 The Court