In which states can railroad companies take land in eminent domain? In Property, fifth edition, by Dukeminier and Krier, on pages 843–54, we are told that in Vermont, railroad companies have the power of eminent domain: they can take land that they need for building tracks. What they take is an easement, but it seems just barely short of fee simple: the land reverts to the permanent owner or successor only if the railroad stops running trains along the track and thereby abandons the easement, but until then it seems to be entirely theirs. Railroads seem to continue operating on a particular track for well over a century sometimes. So my questions are: In which states in the U.S. do railroads have this power? Might that be the reason why many railroad rights-of-way are held in easement rather than in fee simple?
TL; DNR: 1) It is not clear which states gave railroads the power to seize property. It is clear that eminent domain has been used to take land for railroads in every state. However, not every railroad had the power to take land; some governments took the property and then gave it to the railroad. 2) No, railroads didn’t have to use easements because they got to use eminent domain. Railroads had to use easements for the same reason they got to use eminent domain – they were using their property to serve the “public interest”. As a result, they got various subsidies and special deals. In return, they were subject to heightened government control. That control included not always having fee simple ownership of their land. Here are some details: 1) Like many private businesses – from grain mills to canals to shopping malls and hotels – railroads got some of their land via eminent domain. Who could take the land, and under what conditions and restrictions, varied from state to state (and over time). Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no list online telling which states gave which powers to railroads. There may be such a list in one of the treatises on eminent domain, such as Nichols' "The Law of Eminent Domain," or on railroad law. (By their nature, treatises are exhaustive.) However, there is enough information online that you could make a fairly complete list in a few hours; my search for railroad+eminent+domain+(state name) got plenty of hits for every state I tried, including Hawai'i. Recent changes to state laws show how much state laws vary. In response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London, many states made it harder to use eminent domain for development projects. Some of states (South Dakota) explicitly target railroads, while others (Vermont) explicitly exempt railroads. 2) It’s an oversimplification to say railroads either: a) own their land outright (ie, fee simple); or, b) have an easement. Railroads use other forms of property, including fee-simple with conditions and licenses. What these forms of property share is reduced railroad control over its property. As mentioned above, the reason is simple. To encourage railroads to serve the public, they got subsidies. In return, their rights over their property was attenuated. Thus, railroads couldn't set rates at will. One of the valuable rights they gave up was the right to sell the property once they were no longer using it for railroading. 3) The issues of eminent domain and ownership of railroad rights of way are not merely of academic interest. For example, many people today are interested in what to do with abandoned rail rights of way. Who gets the land, under what conditions, and at what price? Can the land be sold outright, “railbanked,” (using it in ways that allow an easy conversion back to rail in the future), turned into trails, utility rights of way, and so on. Not surprisingly, advocates for each of these uses argues that their use is most consistent with existing rights. The growing interest in high speed rail raises again the issue of how to get the land for rail projects. If you want to know more, there is a nice short summary of the history of railroad rights to rights of way in this article from the Vermont Law Review. Her footnotes have lots of good references.
In this answer, I address title question: "If someone catches a Pokemon that is on my property, is that theft?"1 The Pokémon is an entry in a database, presented by Nintendo to users in their mobile app and can be included in a user's collections after that user completes some in-game actions. It isn't your property. It isn't even their (the users') property. Further, a Pokémon appears for all users can be captured again and again by multiple users until it disappears for all users. One user capturing a Pokémon doesn't make it unavailable for others. The Pokémon doesn't "become subject to" any property rights of the owner of the real property that it happens to be virtually overlaid on. Said another way, it doesn't "incur" any of their property rights. Capturing it in-game is not theft. 1. The question in the question body is "does [a Pokémon] incur any kind of property right for the property owner". Incur means "to become subject to". That is different than the broader verb "implicate". This question does not ask (and this answer doesn't answer) whether the Pokémon can implicate the property owner's property rights (e.g. via attractive nuisance, trespass, etc.). Some of that is addressed at a separate question.
That is the case in the state of Washington, for example. All property acquired during a marriage is considered community property. This can make things complicated since there are state-specific rules that can arise in case of a divorce (Enovsys LLC v. Nextel Communications, Inc: the couple declared no community property at the time of the divorce, meaning the wife who was not a party in in infringement case, had no standing – and therefore the infringement suit could procede). This page goes into details. There are 9 US states with community property regimes: it is also the law for Sweden, Germany, France and Italy. In the US, permission from one author is sufficient to constitute &quot;having permission&quot; w.r.t. copyright: an owner of the copyright can license the work, and you do not have to get permission from all owners. This does not invalidate an open source license: spouse 1 can grant such a license even if spouse 2 refuses to grant such a license. Rodrigue v. Rodrigue, 218 F.3d 432 partially answers the question in Louisiana specifically w.r.t. copyright. A lower court held that the state-specific quirk of giving a non-author an equal interest in copyrighted IP must be swept away in the interest of uniformity of federal law. The lower court indeed rejected an argument based on 17 USC 301 which declares federal law to be superior to legal or equitable rights that are equivalent to that set out in Title 17: but community property law is not equivalent to Title 17, it's much broader. The higher courts reasoning is a tall wall of words which boils down the their conclusion that &quot;we disagree with the district court only to the extent that it held the conflict between Louisiana community property law and federal copyright law irreconcilable absent congressional intercession&quot;, and having found a way that didn't involve Congress, they declared the work-creator to be the sole owner of the IP created during the marriage. See also the myriad citations contained therein. What this case in particular shows is that the specifics of the states community property laws will have an effect on how a courts would rule on such an IP question.
Precedents And General Considerations There are cases of similar things happening in Protestant churches and it ends up being quite case by case fact specific with details of how title is held to property, the exact language of governance documents, since Protestant churches are organized at a governance level, and hold property titled in a variety of ways. Usually, the leadership determined in according to the pre-schism governing documents ends up getting the property. But there are property ownership issues specific to the Roman Catholic Church which don't have such clear precedents, because the Roman Catholic Church, due to its great antiquity, wasn't set up in the manner of modern non-profit corporations and associations the way that most modern Protestant churches are, for reasons partly historical, and partly because most Protestant churches are set up either as foundations or as democratically governed institutions with written governance documents tailored to modern legal conventions that are controlling, whereas the Roman Catholic Church, since its inception, has been a non-hereditary monarchy in perpetual succession managed by the College of Cardinals under Canon Law. For this reason, a determination of what would happen in the case of the Roman Catholic Church schism, in which more than one faction of the church claimed to be the legitimate successor to the pre-schism church's property, is even more uncertain and fact specific than in the Protestant church precedents. Among the facts that would matter are the stances taken by the respective factions. If one faction forms a new corporate form of organization and registers with the German government as a new church for church tax purposes, it would essentially cede all of the Roman Catholic church's property, even if it won over 95% of the members of the old Roman Catholic Church and 95% of its lesser clergy, particularly if the new faction did not have the backing of the Pope or the senior members of the pre-schism Roman Catholic Church hierarchy. This is a fairly common fact pattern in Protestant church schisms and is, for example, how schisms in the New England Congregational Churches played out when it was disestablished in the 19th century. Many of New England's formerly established churches, which were organized at a Congregation by Congregation level had board of directors who adopted a Unitarian Christian theological stance, rather than the Trinitarian theological stance shared by the vast majority of Christian denominations. Trinitarian Christians left when this happened and established their own new churches, leaving the property of the rump Unitarian Congregational church in the control of its board of directors. Governance And Title Issues The most common form of ownership of Catholic Church property, globally, is called corporation sole, although the Catholic Church owns property in a variety of means. As explained at the link: In the case of the Roman Catholic Church, ecclesiastical property is usually titled to the diocesan bishop, who serves in the office of the corporation sole. The Roman Catholic Church continues to use corporations sole in holding titles of property: as recently as 2002, it split a diocese in the US state of California into many smaller corporations sole and with each parish priest becoming his own corporation sole, thus limiting the diocese's liability for any sexual abuse or other wrongful activity in which the priest might engage. This is, however, not the case everywhere, and legal application varies. For instance, other U.S. jurisdictions have used corporations at multiple levels. In the jurisdictions of England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland, a Roman Catholic bishop is not a corporation sole, and real property is held by way of land trusts, a tradition dating back to the suppression of Roman Catholicism by Henry VIII during the English Reformation and the Penal Laws of Ireland. For example, some church property is owned by affiliated non-profit corporations with their own boards of directors, that aren't truly titled in the church itself which own lots of Catholic hospital property. Control of property held in this fashion would be determined by the board of directors for these non-profits, which might be afforded discretion to determine which Roman Catholic church is the true one, or even if that decision needs to be made at all. If the governing documents don't require direct input from the church into succession to the board of directors (e.g. if the board fills its own vacancies rather than having vacancies filled by the local Bishop), it may not be necessary to resolve the dispute at all. Even if the governing documents call for the hierarchy of the church to play a part in filling vacancies in the board, German courts might defer to the board regarding which faction's church officials are the ones with the authority to do so. Other moveable property like the clothing and toiletries and personal effects of individual priests doesn't have a certificate of title, but would probably be treated as owned by the individual priests. For property held in corporation sole, title is vested in the current holder of a particular title in the Catholic Church hierarchy. So, for example, a Cathedral in Bonn might be titled in the Archbishop of Bonn in a corporation sole, which means that the Archbishop has the authority of the shareholders, directors and officers of a regular corporation while in office, but when a new Archbishop takes office, that title passed to the new holder of the office, and the succession is understood to be governed by Roman Catholic Canon law as ultimately interpreted by the Pope. One possibility is that the Archbishop sides with the Pope's party, keeps office, and continues to own the property despite having lost many parishioners in the Diocese. This is pretty straightforward. But there are alternative possibilities. Suppose that the sitting Archbishop sides with a faction not supported by the Pope? At first blush, this would suggest that this Archbishop's faction gets the Cathedral and its contents. But suppose that the faction supported by the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church canon law establishment promptly removes the dissenting Archbishop, after he has already broken away. Does the property revert to the newly appointed Archbishop as his successor, or, by casting his lot with the faction that has broken away, has the Archbishop removed the property he holds in corporation sole from the Pope's faction and instead shifted the succession of that particular Archbishop's post to the new faction? This question doesn't have a clear answer. If all of Germany's Bishops and Archbishops and Cardinals and most of its priests united behind a breakaway German Catholic Church, German courts might be inclined to side with the incumbents in those posts, rather than Papally appointed replacements. But there is really no way to have certainty about what would happen in the situation in advance. In the Great Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, of 1054 CE, the affiliation of the local bishops is what largely prevailed in determining which faction of the church ended up controlling church property. The Precedent Of The Reformation Isn't Helpful During the Reformation, in the 16th century, what happened is that the secular feudal lord or king decided either to stay Roman Catholic, or to join the new Protestant Lutheran or Calvinist or Episcopal or Presbyterian church in the region, as the case might be. If the lord or king stayed Catholic, the Catholic church hierarchy got the Roman Catholic church's property in his domain, and the Protestant converts were persecuted as heretics. In the case that the lord or king sided with the Protestants, the Roman Catholic church property went to the feudal lord's new Protestant church, together with all priests and other members of holy orders who didn't refuse to swear allegiance to the new Protestant church, and all of the residents of his domain were converted to Protestantism (or faced persecution as heretics if they didn't) whether they wanted to or not, because this was considered to be a decision for the lord rather than for the individual. But obviously, that isn't what would happen in Germany today. Historical Succession Fights Within The Roman Catholic Church The other historical precent might be more apt, but equally unclear. There have been several times in the history of the Roman Catholic Church in which the succession to the Papacy was contested. In 20/20 hindsight we call the winners of those succession fights &quot;Popes&quot; and the losers of those succession fights &quot;anti-Popes&quot;. The most recent spate of antipopes were Clement VII (1378), Benedict XIII (1394), Alexander V (1409), John XXIII (1410), although there was also a final antipope, Felix V (1439) (who abandoned his claim after less than a year voluntarily). The first antipope was Saint Hippolytus (217). There were 31 antipopes in between them (give or take depending upon how you count them and who you conclude qualifies). As Wikipedia explains: An antipope (Latin: antipapa) is a person who, in opposition to the lawful pope, makes a significant attempt to occupy the position of Bishop of Rome and leader of the Catholic Church. At times between the 3rd and mid-15th centuries, antipopes were supported by important factions within the Church itself and by secular rulers. Sometimes it was difficult to distinguish which of two claimants should be called pope and which antipope, as in the case of Pope Leo VIII and Pope Benedict V. . . . The period in which antipopes were most numerous was during the struggles between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors of the 11th and 12th centuries. The emperors frequently imposed their own nominees to further their own causes. The popes, likewise, sometimes sponsored rival imperial claimants (anti-kings) in Germany to overcome a particular emperor. The Western Schism—which began in 1378, when the French cardinals, claiming that the election of Pope Urban VI was invalid, elected antipope Clement VII as a rival to the Roman Pope—led eventually to two competing lines of antipopes: the Avignon line (Clement VII took up residence in Avignon, France), and the Pisan line. The Pisan line, which began in 1409, was named after the town of Pisa, Italy, where the (Pisan) council had elected antipope Alexander V as a third claimant. To end the schism, in May 1415, the Council of Constance deposed antipope John XXIII of the Pisan line. Pope Gregory XII of the Roman line resigned in July 1415. In 1417, the Council also formally deposed antipope Benedict XIII of Avignon, but he refused to resign. Afterwards, Pope Martin V was elected and was accepted everywhere except in the small and rapidly diminishing area that remained faithful to Benedict XIII. Liturgical councils or actual wars and assassinations over the course of history resolved the various disputes, but as the Western Schism which took 39 years to resolve illustrates, the need for practical resolution of the question on the ground could come to head much sooner, and would have to be resolved by German secular courts in the meantime (possibly assisted by certified questions to the German Constitutional Court as freedom of religion issues under the German Constitution might be implicated) in the context of specific questions of control over specific items of tangible personal property and of real property came up. Pending final resolutions of these disputes on the merits, the German courts would probably impose some sort of temporary orders to adjudicate the immediate question of control pending adjudication of the issue on the merits, which might take some time to resolve, probably with many appeals (assuming that the dispute remained live, rather than being settled in some sort of agreement between the leaders of the respective factions claiming authority over the property). A Precedent of An Orthodox Church in Germany Commentator K-HB made on a comment on March 19 at 19:34 that is one of the most important precedents in this case, which I reproduce below with a few corrected spelling/punctuation issues: There is sort of a precedent from the conflict around St. Salvator in Munich. The church is property of the state (Bavaria) but was given for use to the Greek-Orthodox parish in 1829. In the 1970s the parish (or the crucial people) seceded from the Greek-Orthodox hierarchy. Bavaria wanted the church back in order to give it to the &quot;official&quot; Greek-Orthodox Church. After many years of litigation up to the German Constitutional Court and the ECHR [ European Court of Human Rights] Bavaria won. But if you read the judgments, you see that it belongs heavily on the individual case (historical background and current situation). The Role Of Germany's Church Tax One factor that might be decisive in resolving this is that German has what is commonly called in English language sources a &quot;church tax&quot; which is a voluntary deduction from worker's paychecks, along with taxes, that is automatically delivered to the church with whom the worker is officially affiliated in German government records. In that system, there are currently about 8 million people who are registered as Roman Catholics who participate in the system and have their payroll deductions turned over to the Roman Catholic church. The details of the administrative process in the German church tax system that determine who in the Roman Catholic church is authorized to receive the church tax payments from Roman Catholics in Germany would probably be highly influential in how secular courts adjudicating property ownership disputes between the factions would resolve those questions.
The situation you describe is ordinary condemnation not inverse condemnation. If the government is actively taking legal/transactional effort to acquire the lot it is a condemnation. An inverse condemnation is when the government takes property without court process or trying to pay for it, and you sue for compensation for the property that was taken. If the government just bulldozed a sidewalk in someone's front yard without asking, and the owner sued the government for compensation, that would be an inverse condemnation case. The short answer is that the government has every right to condemn property adjacent to a highway for use as a sidewalk. This is a classic public purpose. Generally, the government must first attempt to acquire the property out of court by making an offer for the land, and, if it is unsuccessful in getting the owner to accept its offer, it will bring an eminent domain action to seize the land for public purposes. In the eminent domain case, the government will win on its right to condemn the land and to take immediate possession of it pending a determination of its value, because the government has the right to seize land to build sidewalks. Then, the rest of the eminent domain case will be over the fair market value of the land taken.
The Validity of State Wealth Taxes Yes. States can impose wealth taxes, although this doesn't clarify the validity of a federal wealth tax. States have broader taxing power than the federal government in terms of kinds of taxes that they may constitutionally impose. A state may impose any tax (1) that does not unduly discriminate against a federally protected constitutional civil liberty (like freedom of the press), (2) that does not purport to tax the federal government (arguably any other sovereign) without its consent, (3) that does not unduly discriminate against interstate commerce, and (4) that has some rational basis. Apart from these specific limitations and (5) any found in state law or the state's constitution, (6) a state's taxing power is plenary as to conduct or activity or property that has a sufficient connection to the state to provide it with jurisdiction. A recent U.S. Supreme Court case repealed some clear rules of the road regarding what states do not have the jurisdiction to tax, effectively increasing state tax jurisdiction considerably, for example, to impose sales taxes on Internet retailers. the biggest problem for a state like California trying to extract revenue from its uber-wealthy populace would be that they would simply move their residence and use any other possible legal loophole to avoid having to pay. This is true. The primary question regarding the validity of a state wealth tax would not be whether a state could impose a wealth tax, but what assets could a state make subject to its state wealth tax. This might be easy to answer in the case of real property, but hard in the case of intangible property or property held via entities. Federal statutes may, however, establish which states have jurisdiction to tax which assets with a state wealth tax as part of the power to regulate interstate commerce, or by ratifying a compact reached between multiple states which have state wealth taxes. Still the facts that many countries in the European Union impose or have historically imposed wealth taxes that generate significant tax revenue, despite the easy ability to the affluent to relocated to other countries in the E.U. that is closely analogous to that of U.S. states seeking to do the same thing, suggest that this is not an insurmountable task, even if there might be some leakage of untaxed wealth at the margins. The Validity of Federal Wealth Taxes In contrast, Congress may only impose taxes expressly authorized by some provision of the U.S. Constitution as amended. The applicable case law on the issue of the constitutionality of a federal wealth tax is not entirely settled. The gift, estate and generation skipping transfer tax system has been held to be constitutional, but since this is a tax imposed on transfers of wealth, it is arguably a tax in lieu of an income tax treated separately for ease of administration (since gifts and inheritances are within the core definition of income in the Internal Revenue Code at Section 63, but then specifically exempted from income taxation in lieu of donative transfer taxes like the gift and estate tax, in a separate statutory Section 102 of the Internal Revenue Code.). Federal property taxes in areas not in exclusively federal jurisdiction (e.g. Virginia rather than the U.S. Virgin Islands) were briefly in force in the 1700s, but were repealed before they could be subject to a constitutional challenge. Income taxes, even at 90% marginal tax rates, have been upheld as valid. The analysis and doctrines involved are rather involved for a short answer in this forum, and I am fairly certain that there is published legal scholarship arguing both sides of this question of first impression. In a nutshell, a federal tax must either be an income tax; tax imposed on states rather than individuals on a per capita basis; or an excise tax or duty or tariff. The first two types of taxes are comparatively well defined. The third is the subject of thin, mushy and somewhat inconsistent or indeterminate case law. One could argue, for example, that a wealth tax is really a form of income tax on imputed income from assets that could generate additional value to the owner even if the value that arises from this ownership is not monetized or realized. This argument would be particularly strong if wealth taxes paid with respect to an asset were allowed as a tax credit against taxes imposed on income generated by that same asset, in a manner similar to the foreign tax credit today. A wealth tax clearly isn't a per capita tax on a state government. No such tax has ever been imposed for any meaningful amount of time and has never been a more than nominal source of federal revenues if it has ever generated any federal revenues. There is also a credible argument that a wealth tax is a constitutionally valid excise tax or duty or tariff, focusing on the excise tax component, which is quite ill defined, because the courts have tended to side with the government on issues of the scope of the federal power to tax except in the clearest and most blatant cases of violations of the federal power to tax.
There is no "theft" without a law that defines what "property" is and what "theft" is. Laws derive from the state that has the power to enforce them. A state may issue the laws and decrees and stablish who owns the lands. It can later make changes to that ownership. When the Normans invaded England, Willian I became the legal authority and with that he could award, confiscate and keep lands as he saw fit, without that being considered "theft" in any legal sense of the word. The English government (and all others) still have the authority to take away, redistribute and otherwise change the ownership of lands as they see fit, and nothing of it would be theft. Internally most of them have chosen to stablish some procedures to ensure that this is only done when needed by meeting some tests (eminent domain), but even if they didn't have those (again, self-imposed) restrictions they still would be able to change ownership as they saw fit. That does not mean that a government using that power to punish political opponents or ethnic minorities would not face internal and external protests.
Probably not It’s extremely likely that the adjoining properties have easements for support over the land which gives them the right to build on it. Even if they don’t, he can’t damage their property by removing the essential structures on his land. He could sue for trespass which his neighbors could easily settle by offering to compensate him for his loss - the $50 the land is worth.