Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon

Last updated

Pennsylvania Coal Company v. Mahon
Seal of the United States Supreme Court.svg
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued November 14, 1922
Decided December 11, 1922
Full case namePennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon
Citations260 U.S. 393 ( more )
43 S. Ct. 158; 67 L. Ed. 322; 1922 U.S. LEXIS 2381
Case history
PriorMahon v. Pa. Coal Co., 274 Pa. 489, 118 A. 491 (1922)
Holding
Whether a regulatory act constitutes a taking requiring compensation depends on the extent of diminution in the value of the property.
Court membership
Chief Justice
William H. Taft
Associate Justices
Joseph McKenna  · Oliver W. Holmes Jr.
Willis Van Devanter  · Mahlon Pitney
James C. McReynolds  · Louis Brandeis
George Sutherland
Case opinions
MajorityHolmes, joined by Taft, McKenna, Day, Van Devanter, Pitney, McReynolds, Sutherland
DissentBrandeis
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amends. V, XIV

Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that whether a regulatory act constitutes a taking requiring compensation depends on the extent of diminution in the value of the property. [1]

Contents

The decision thereby started the doctrine of regulatory taking. The Takings Clause originally applied only when the government physically seized or occupied property. Prior to 1922, American courts followed a clear rule: regulation of land was not a taking. Rather, it was simply an exercise of the government’s police power to protect the public health, safety, welfare, and morals.

Pennsylvania Coal also established the diminution-of-value test, in contrast to other tests, such as the permanent physical occupations test of Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp. (1982), [2] the nuisance-control measures test of Hadacheck v. Sebastian (1915), [3] and the total takings test of Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council (1992). [4] Additionally, the case was one of the first to address the denominator problem with regard to regulatory taking.

Parties

Plaintiff/Respondent: H.J. Mahon, owner of surface rights to parcel of land.

Defendant/Petitioner: Pennsylvania Coal Co., owner of mining rights to parcel of land.

Background

State of law

In the late 19th century, the modern regulatory state was developing and the "scope of police regulation" was broadened. Whereas police regulations that restricted private property uses were originally thought to be used mostly to avoid noxious uses, police powers were expanding. Consequently, takings without compensation increased and the flaws of the previous takings doctrine, that exercises of police power could never be takings, became more apparent along with the need for changes in the takings law.

At the time this case was decided, Mugler v. Kansas , "was the leading case standing for the proposition that an exercise of the police power could never be a taking ... even if they deprive property holders of all economic use of their property." [5]

Facts of case

In an 1878 deed, the Pennsylvania Coal Co. granted to H. J. Mahon the surface rights to a parcel of land, but retained the mining rights to the land, and Mahon accepted any risk from, and waived all claim for damages resulting from, mining below the property. In 1921, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania passed the Kohler Act, which prohibited the mining of anthracite coal in such way as to cause the subsidence of, among other things, any structure used as a human habitation. Prior Pennsylvania law had recognized that such pillars of coal necessary to support the land surface were an estate in land (a "support estate"), separate from the rights in removable coal. Pennsylvania Coal provided notice to Mahon that it planned to mine for coal under Mahon's habitation, and Mahon brought suit to prevent Pennsylvania Coal from mining under his land pursuant to the Kohler Act.

Prior history

Mahon sued in the Court of Common Pleas to enjoin Pennsylvania Coal from conducting mining, but the court denied the injunction, holding the application of the Kohler Act to this case would be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania reversed, holding that the statute was a, "legitimate exercise of the police power" and granted an injunction. PA Coal v. Mahon, 43 Sup Ct. 412.

Issues and Holdings

Issue #1: Whether the Kohler Act as applied to the property in question constitutes an exercise of the police power, requiring no compensation, or of eminent domain, requiring compensation;

-Holding #1: The Kohler Act as applied to the property in question constitutes an exercise of eminent domain, requiring compensation

Issue #2: Whether the Kohler Act in general constitutes an exercise of the police power or of eminent domain.

-Holding #2: The Kohler act in general constitutes an exercise of eminent domain.

Rule of law

The Court ruled that whether a regulatory act constitutes a taking requiring compensation depends on the extent of diminution in the value of the property.

Reasoning

The Court argued as follows: (1) The damage done by the activity prohibited by the act is a private, not a public nuisance; there is no public safety justification for the statute, as notice before mining would suffice to protect public safety. On the other hand, the damage done by the statute is significant, insofar as it abolishes an estate in land and a binding contract. (2) The statute, in general, purports to extinguish the mining rights to valuable properties under surfaces owned by the public and the government. The statute makes prohibitively expensive the mining of coal in these areas, and thereby effectively destroys the right; after all, owning coal is not worth anything if the coal cannot be mined. The rights of the public to its streets and other property are rights paid for. If the representatives of the public have been so shortsighted as not to pay for the mining rights of the land as well, there is no authority to grant those rights without compensation. (If the land above required compensation, so therefore does the land below.)

The Court also employed a general sense of morality when it stated, "We are in danger of forgetting that a strong public desire to improve the public condition is not enough to warrant achieving the desire by a shorter cut than the constitutional way of paying for the change." Id. at 416.

Dissenting Opinion: Brandeis, J.

Justice Brandeis, "chiefly argued for what is now called the nuisance exception: if a land use is itself noxious, dangerous, or causes a public nuisance, the legislature is free to regulate its use without compensation, even though the police power may cause great loss to the property owner." [6]

Brandeis explained nearly every restriction upon the use of property entails a deprival of some right of the owner, but this can be justified by the police power because restrictions, "imposed to protect the public health, safety or morals from dangers threatened is not a taking." [7] In this case, the police power applies insofar as the Kohler Act prohibits a noxious use, the noxious use here being the subsidence of buildings. Justice Brandeis also addresses the public/private aspect of the Kohler Act stating that, "the purpose of a restriction does not cease to be public, because incidentally some private persons may thereby receive gratuitously valuable special benefits...Furthermore, a restriction, though imposed for a public purpose, will not be lawful, unless the restriction is an appropriate means to the public end. But to keep coal in place is surely an appropriate means of preventing subsidence of the surface; and ordinarily it is the only available means." [8]

Result

Judgment/disposition

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania judgment reversed.

Subsequent Case History

Today, the Supreme Court quotes Justice Holmes in Mahon for the recognition of the invalidity of a government regulation that so severely burdens private property that it constitutes a taking under the Fifth Amendment. The cited cases include: Goldblatt v. Hempstead , 369 U.S. 590, 594 (1962); Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City , 438 U.S. 104, 127 (1978); Agins v. City of Tiburon , 447 U.S. 255 (1980); San Diego Gas & Electric Co. v. City of San Diego , 450 U.S. 621 (1981); Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp. , 458 U.S. 419 (1982); Keystone Bituminous Coal Association v. DeBenedictis , 480 U.S. 470 (1987); First English Evangelical Lutheran Church v. County of Los Angeles , 482 U.S. 304 (1987); and Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council , 505 U.S. 1003, 1014 (1992).

Subsequent research

Economist William A. Fischel [9] has explained the disparity between what was actually happening in the Scranton area during the time of Mahon and how the area was portrayed in the litigation. Subsidence did not happen often, the vast majority of coal companies worked hard to prevent subsidence, and when it did the companies generally paid to fix any damage. Most of the subsidence issues were cracks in foundation and the settling of parts of houses. Yet a brief submitted for the city of Scranton "painted a picture of disaster, which has been accepted as the likely outcome of the decision in the legal literature." [10] When Fischel investigated subsidence issues in anthracite coal mining in Pennsylvania, he was "struck by how little was written about the subsidence problem, which was in stark contrast to the picture painted for the Court in the briefs of the City of Scranton. In their study of the anthracite saga, The Kingdom of Coal (1985), the historians Donald Miller and Richard Sharpless did not mention subsidence in the 360 pages" of their book. [11] In a subsequent conversation, Sharpless told Fischel that subsidence was not mentioned was "because it was not much of an issue". [12] When Fischel visited the Anthracite Heritage Museum near Scranton, he asked the librarian to help him locate works on subsidence and, "all that was available were technical pamphlets and a few relatively recent (post 1950) newspaper clippings that illustrated some damage." [13] Fischel's research revealed that surface damage "seems to have been episodic and limited; cities were not literally falling into the earth. Nor did any of the newspaper stories raise the question of legal liability for surface support." [14]

Justice Holmes

Benjamin Barros [15] noted that Justice Holmes, throughout his career as a state and federal judge, "held a consistent view ... that restrictions imposed through the police power could reach a point where they become takings and violate the Just Compensation Clause." [16] states that because of the distinct departure the holding in this case took from Mugler v. Kansas, the prior leading case in takings jurisprudence, it was "somewhat surprising that Holmes ignored Mugler entirely in his Mahon opinion." However, in a letter written shortly after Mahon was decided, Holmes regretted his lack of elaboration on the basis of his decision, and suggested that his disagreement with Mugler was influential in shaping his holding in Mahon. [17] In fact, in a letter dated January 13, 1923, Justice Holmes stated "I always have thought that old Harlan's decision in Mugler v. Kansas was pretty fishy." [18]

See also

Related Research Articles

In United States constitutional law, a regulatory taking occurs when governmental regulations limit the use of private property to such a degree that the landowner is effectively deprived of all economically reasonable use or value of their property. Under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution governments are required to pay just compensation for such takings. The amendment is incorporated to the states via the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Eminent domain, land acquisition, compulsory purchase, resumption, resumption/compulsory acquisition, or expropriation is the power of a state, provincial, or national government to take private property for public use. It does not include the power to take and transfer ownership of private property from one property owner to another private property owner without a valid public purpose. This power can be legislatively delegated by the state to municipalities, government subdivisions, or even to private persons or corporations, when they are authorized by the legislature to exercise the functions of public character.

Inverse condemnation is a legal concept and cause of action used by property owners when a governmental entity takes an action which damages or decreases the value of private property without obtaining ownership of the property through the use of eminent domain. Thus, unlike the typical eminent domain case, the property owner is the plaintiff and not the defendant.

Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, 535 U.S. 302 (2002), is one of the United States Supreme Court's more recent interpretations of the Takings Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The case dealt with the question of whether a moratorium on construction of individual homes imposed by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency fell under the Takings Clause of the United States Constitution and whether the landowners therefore should receive just compensation as required by that clause. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency was represented by future Chief Justice John Roberts. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion of the Court, finding that the moratorium did not constitute a taking. It reasoned that there was an inherent difference between the acquisition of property for public use and the regulation of property from private use. The majority concluded that the moratorium at issue in this case should be classified as a regulation of property from private use and therefore no compensation was required.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2004 Oregon Ballot Measure 37 and 2007 Oregon Ballot Measure 49</span> Oregon ballot measures

Oregon Ballot Measure 37 was a controversial land-use ballot initiative that passed in the U.S. state of Oregon in 2004 and is now codified as Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) 195.305. Measure 37 has figured prominently in debates about the rights of property owners versus the public's right to enforce environmental and other land use regulations. Voters passed Measure 49 in 2007, substantially reducing the impact of Measure 37.

Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003 (1992), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States established the "total takings" test for evaluating whether a particular regulatory action constitutes a regulatory taking that requires compensation.

Navigable servitude is a doctrine in United States constitutional law that gives the federal government the right to regulate navigable waterways as an extension of the Commerce Clause in Article I, Section 8 of the constitution. It is also sometimes called federal navigational servitude.

Keystone Bituminous Coal Ass'n v. DeBenedictis, 480 U.S. 470 (1987), is a United States Supreme Court case interpreting the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause. In this case, the court upheld a Pennsylvania statute which limited coal mining causing damage to buildings, dwellings, and cemeteries through subsidence.

Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp., 458 U.S. 419 (1982), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that when the character of the governmental action is a permanent physical occupation of property, the government actions effects regulatory taking to the extent of the occupation, without regard to whether the action achieves an important public benefit or has only minimal economic impact on the owner. In doing so, it established the permanent physical presence test for regulatory takings.

Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson City, 473 U.S. 172 (1985), is a U.S. Supreme Court case that limited access to federal court for plaintiffs alleging uncompensated takings of private property under the Fifth Amendment. In June 2019, this case was overruled in part by the Court's decision in Knick v. Township of Scott, Pennsylvania.

United States v. Causby, 328 U.S. 256 (1946), was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision related to ownership of airspace above private property. The United States government claimed a public right to fly over Thomas Lee Causby's farm located near an airport in Greensboro, North Carolina. Causby argued that the government's low-altitude flights entitled him to just compensation under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Mugler v. Kansas, 123 U.S. 623 (1887), was an important United States Supreme Court case in which the 7–1 opinion of Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan and the lone partial dissent by Associate Justice Stephen Johnson Field laid the foundation for the Supreme Court's later acceptance and defense during the Lochner era of Justice Field's theory of economic substantive due process under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Commonwealth v. Alger, 61 Mass. 53, was decided by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in 1851. The majority opinion was written by Justice Lemuel Shaw.

Eastern Enterprises v. Apfel, 524 U.S. 498 (1998), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Coal Industry Retiree Health Benefit Act constituted an unconstitutional regulatory taking of property which required the Act to be invalidated. The import of this decision is that it was made in the context of a purely economic regulation. The plurality examines the statute and its resultant harm as an ad hoc factual inquiry based on factors delineated in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, such as the economic impact of the regulation, its interference with reasonable investment backed expectations, and the character of the governmental action. The decision thereby moved beyond the traditional notions of equal protection which had been applied to economic regulation since the time of Lochner v. New York, requiring extreme deference to Congress, and applied a regulatory takings analysis to the problem resulting in a much less deferential result. While the plurality recognizes that this is not a traditional takings case where the government appropriates private property for public use, they also state this is the type of case where the "Armstrong Principle" of preventing the government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole. However, while the plurality seems to invalidate this particular law on takings grounds, the concurrences and the dissents warn of such an analysis as this should actually be examined under substantive due process or ex post facto theories.

Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A. Inc., 544 U.S. 528 (2005), was a landmark case in United States regulatory takings law whereby the Court expressly overruled precedent created in Agins v. City of Tiburon. Agins held that a government regulation of private property effects a taking if such regulation does not substantially advance legitimate state interests. Writing for the Court, Justice O’Connor found the test untenable for a number of reasons, but declined to grant Chevron relief because Chevron’s motion before the court was limited to a discussion of the “substantially advances” theory which had just been struck down. The Court remanded to the Ninth Circuit for a determination of whether the statute exacted a taking according to the formula of Penn Central.

United States v. Riverside Bayview, 474 U.S. 121 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case challenging the scope of federal regulatory powers over waterways as pertaining to the definition of "waters of the United States" as written in the Clean Water Act of 1972. The Court ruled unanimously that the government does have the power to control intrastate wetlands as waters of the United States. This ruling was effectively revised in Rapanos v. United States (2006), in which the Court adopted a very narrow interpretation of "navigable waters."

Block v. Hirsh, 256 U.S. 135 (1921), is a United States Supreme Court case which upheld a temporary rent control law in the District of Columbia. It set a precedent in American law that government can regulate housing conditions during times of emergency to maintain or improve living conditions.

Goldblatt v. Hempstead, 369 U.S. 590 (1962), was a United States Supreme Court case concerning whether a town ordinance regulating a use of a property was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment, finding the law in question was constitutional as an exercise of the town's police powers.

Eminent domain in the United States refers to the power of a state or the federal government to take private property for public use while requiring just compensation to be given to the original owner. It can be legislatively delegated by the state to municipalities, government subdivisions, or even to private persons or corporations, when they are authorized to exercise the functions of public character.

References

  1. ↑ Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922).
  2. ↑ Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp. , 458 U.S. 419 (1982).
  3. ↑ Hadacheck v. Sebastian , 239 U.S. 394 (1915).
  4. ↑ Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council , 505 U.S. 1003 (1992).
  5. ↑ Barros, D. Benjamin (January 2004). "The Police Power and the Takings Clause". University of Miami Law Review . 52: 471–524. SSRN   742712. (page 504)
  6. ↑ Fischel, William A. (1995). Regulatory takings : law, economics, and politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. p. 22. ISBN   978-0674753884.
  7. ↑ Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon,260 U.S. 393, Page 260 U. S. 417(Sup Ct.1922).
  8. ↑ Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon,260 U.S. 393, Page 260 U. S. 417-418(Sup Ct.1922).
  9. ↑ "William A. Fischel, Professor of Economics and Robert C. 1925 & Hilda Hardy Professor of Legal Studies" Dartmouth College. Retrieved 14 November 2023.
  10. ↑ William A. Fischell, Regulatory Takings: Law, Economics, and Politics (1995). p 24
  11. ↑ Fischel, p 25.
  12. ↑ Fischel
  13. ↑ Fischel, p 26.
  14. ↑ Fischel
  15. ↑ " D. Benjamin Barros, Dean and Professor of Law". Stetson University, College of Law. retrieved 14 November 2023
  16. ↑ D. Benjamin Barros, "The Police Power and the Takings Clause", 58 UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW 471 (2004) p. 506.
  17. ↑ Barros, p. 504.
  18. ↑ Barros

Selected articles

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.