Issue of Property Rights Is Likely to Arise in Sotomayor’s Confirmation Hearings

...Judge Sonia Sotomayor will doubtless be questioned about Kelo at her confirmation hearings next month. But her answers will be complicated by her participation in a 2006 decision applying and extending Kelo. Bart Didden, the property owner on the losing side of that decision, Didden v. Village of Port Chester, said in an interview that he had been contacted by aides to Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee who seemed eager to explore Judge Sotomayor’s views on property rights. The ruling in Didden is not popular among some property rights and constitutional law professors. Eight of them filed a brief in 2006 unsuccessfully urging the Supreme Court to hear an appeal. “This is the worst federal court takings decision since Kelo,” said Ilya Somin, who teaches property law at George Mason University and helped write the brief. “It’s very extreme, and it is significant as a window into Judge Sotomayor’s attitudes toward private property.”...The case arose from a meeting in 2003 between Mr. Didden, who owned property in Port Chester, N.Y., and an executive of a company that had been designated by the village to develop a 27-acre urban renewal area that included part of the property. What happened at that meeting, Mr. Didden said, amounted to extortion. Mr. Didden had made arrangements to put a CVS drug store on his lot. At the meeting, the executive, Gregg Wasser, demanded $800,000 as the price for permission to proceed with that project, Mr. Didden said in court papers. The alternative, Mr. Wasser said, according to the papers, was to have the village condemn Mr. Didden’s property so that Mr. Wasser’s company could put a Walgreen’s in the same place. “Here is a private person standing in the shoes of the government with the power to condemn or not condemn,” Mr. Didden said. “The $800,000 wasn’t going to rehabilitate a public park or build a soccer stadium. It was going into his pocket.” Mr. Didden refused. The next day the village condemned his property...Mr. Didden and a business partner sued, and a federal judge dismissed their case in 2004. When the case reached Judge Sotomayor’s court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Mr. Didden said he had reason to be hopeful...But then more than a year passed. In the end, the decision was terse and unsigned, and it rejected Mr. Didden’s claims. “It took 54 weeks to issue those four paragraphs,” Mr. Didden said. According to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, the median interval between argument and decision in the Second Circuit, both then and now, is less than a month. The brief decision in Didden made two points. First, it said Mr. Didden had filed his suit too late. The village had announced the redevelopment plan in 1999, and Mr. Didden did not sue until 2004. His claim, the court said, was therefore barred by a three-year statute of limitations. That was a curious ruling, Professor Epstein said, because it required Mr. Didden to sue over his claim of extortion before it happened...NYTimes