Supreme Court Will Examine Whether a Wisconsin Family Needs Government Permission to Sell Their Land

After a decade of legal wrangling over the fate of their half-century old cabin, the Murr family will take their property rights dispute from the backwoods of western Wisconsin to the marble halls of the U.S. Supreme Court. And what began as a regulatory battle over less than three acres of land has morphed into a legal case attracting interest from eight other states. The Supreme Court next month will hear oral arguments for Murr V. Wisconsin, a case that originated all the way back in 2004, when Donna Murr and her siblings tried to sell a parcel of land along the St. Croix River that the family has owned since the 1960s. They couldn't do that, they were told by St. Croix County and the state Department of Natural Resources, because the parcel was not large enough to comply with regulations regarding the distance between waterways and buildings. There's nothing built on the 1.25 acre parcel the Murrs were trying to sell, but the family own a cabin that sits on an adjacent 1.25 acre piece of land. They couldn't sell the vacant parcel without tearing down the cabin on the other parcel, they were told. Even though the two pieces of land are separate—Donna Murr says the family has paid taxes on them, separately, since buying the neighboring, vacant parcel in the 1960s as an investment—the county and state say they can combine the parcels for regulatory purposes because they have a common owner, thanks to a state law passed in 1975. "We aren't going to be allowed to sell the second parcel, unless we tore down the cabin next door. We were stunned," Murr said Tuesday on a conference call with reporters. "We couldn't believe that the government would happily take our property tax dollars for fifty years, and then deny us the basic property rights here."...more