Earth to Dew
Apparently you missed the part about this being a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, not your local circuit court. Either that or you're unfamiliar with our judicial system and how the common law system works? Stare decisis is not a galaxy next to the Milky Way.
Most Supreme Court rulings have broad and far-reaching ramifications. This one, in particular, is a dramatic departure from the body of eminent domain law it modifies.
I'm not going to write you up a treatise, but this is not about me "reading a lot into" it. The majority opinion needs little "reading into". It's very clear. And it's an enormous shift. Anyone who's studied that case and/or has worked in eminent domain should be able to confirm that for you and/or explain what I'm talking about.
The precedential scope here is disturbing on a number of levels, not just the enormous leap in expanding the bounds of inverse condemnation. It gives a virtual warehouse full of additional ammunition to those who decry the expansion of the judiciary into legislative affairs. In fact, the court effectively set the judiciary up to effectively serve as a massive zoning appeals board, and sort of random arbiter in a brand new wide open field of judgment on which there is NO existing case law to guide government action, or lower courts.
This opens the door to what will become one of the biggest legal clusterf*cks of all time. It's one thing to have courts deciding what constitutes pornography. It's another thing entirely to have governments and private property owners acting without having any idea where the boundaries are, and then having a gaggle of lower courts (and eventually Circuit Courts of Appeal) all assembling bodies of case law based on random judgments, none of which will likely bear any resemblance to each other or to a logical, rational, coherent public policy.
Beyond the legal ramifications, has it not sunk in what the societal ramifications are?
For better or worse, our political system has been corrupted by gerrymandered districts and a tyranny of the wealthy political donors. For all practical purposes, although we participate in a voting charade each November, there really aren't many "elections" going on. At the federal level, less than 5% of seats are really open to competitive races where the voters have a reason to weigh in. Check up on what's going on in California to get a primer on how a monopolistic political class has used a corrupt redistricting process to effectively eliminate meaningful electoral democracy.
What's that got to do with eminent domain? Pretty straightforward. What this decision means in practical terms is that if someone of wealth wants to take your property from you, he can. He "owns" City Hall, and now, this says City Hall, in the name of "economic development" can act as a stand-in enforcer/thug and simply by force take your property.
