On this episode: Berman v. Parker, the Supreme Court’s decision in 1954 to abandon previous constitutional limits on the government’s power to take property from Person A to give it to Person B. The decision greenlit the era of urban renewal, which saw over a thousand cities across the country seize and bulldoze entire neighborhoods en masse.
Click here for episode transcript.
Guests
Amy Lavine
Resources
Amy Lavine, Urban Renewal and the Story of Berman v. Parker
Wendell Pritchett, The “Public Menace” of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain
Jim Ely, Can the “Despotic Power” be Tamed? Reconsidering the Public Use Limitation on Eminent Domain
Ilya Somin, The Case for Expanding the Anticanon of Constitutional Law
Recent Episodes
Younger abstention | Season 4, Ep. 4
In 1966, Los Angeles officials tried to put a man in prison for handing out leaflets in protest of a fatal police shooting. Today, we […]
Listen NowOath or Affirmation. (And Treason.) | Season 4, Ep. 3
On this episode, we recover a lost part of the Fourth Amendment that the Supreme Court essentially erased in 1960. In the case of Jones […]
Listen NowNeedless Friction. And Treason.
On this episode: the story of Pullman abstention, the first of several abstention doctrines the Supreme Court invented to let federal judges decline to decide […]
Listen NowRooker and Feldman and Treason | Season 4, Ep. 1
Next week, the Supreme Court is going to hear a huge civil rights case that no one is talking about—because the legal issue before the […]
Listen Now