Grand Theft and Petty Larceny: Property Rights in America

When the government takes private property to build a bridge or highway, the owner must be justly compensated for the inconvenience. The Constitution guarantees this. But what about when excessive government regulation and a slow-grinding legal process blocks you from building on your land or makes it virtually impossible to develop your property? Thousands of people become such bureaucratic casualties daily. What accountability and compensation are you entitled to when you've been wronged by the government? Grand Theft and Petit Larceny reveals the gradual undermining of the rights of property owners in the 20th century - in direct opposition to what the Framers of the Constitution fought hard to gain - and how continuing on this course will be fundamentally disastrous for us all, property owner and non-property owner alike.
As horror stories about regulatory confiscation of land in the name of protecting endangered species, wetlands, and other purposes have mounted, fresh attention is being paid to the "takings" clause of the Constitution. In recent years the U.S. Supreme Court has been moving, albeit slowly and hesitantly, to restore a wider applicability of the Fifth Amendment and rein in some kinds of government regulation of land.
Mark Pollot takes the reader back to the philosophical origins and early debate over the protection of property rights and through ratification of the federal Constitution and Bill of Rights; looks at the initial level of property rights afforded by the courts and the gradual decline in protection of those rights by the same courts over time; exposes the effects of the decline in property rights on American life; and finally, offers a practical strategy for restoring property rights to their proper place in American society.
With key property rights cases set to come before the U.S. Supreme Court in the next several years, the issue promises to be among the decade's great controversies. The Supreme Court's ability to make the necessary property rights reforms will mean an end to what the great judicial activist Oliver Wendell Holmes called "the petty larceny of the police power."