David H. Lucas, Petitioner v. South Carolina Coastal Council

In 1986, the petitioner Lucas purchased two residential lots at issue in this litigation on a South Carolina barrier island. He intended to build single family homes. At that time, the lots were not subject to the State’s coastal zone building permit requirements. In 1988, however, the state legislature enacted the Beachfront Management Act, which barred Lucas from erecting any permanent habitable structures on his parcels. The act recognized the beach/dune system along the coast of South Carolina as extremely important as it provided, inter alia, habitat for numerous species of plants and animals, several of which were threatened or endangered. Lucas promptly filed suit contending that the Beachfront Management Act’s construction bar effected a taking of his property without just compensation because the ban on construction deprived him of all "economically viable use" of his property. The state trial court agreed, finding that the ban "deprived Lucas of any reasonable economic use of the lots” and rendered Lucas’s parcels "valueless". The State Supreme Court reversed, ruling that, when a regulation respecting the use of property was designed "to prevent serious public harm", no compensation was owed under the Takings Clause regardless of the regulation’s effect on the property’s value. The Supreme Court held that the State Supreme Court had erred in applying the "harmful or noxious uses" principle to decide this case. The question rather had to turn on citizens’ historic understandings regarding the content of the "bundle of rights" that they acquired when they took title to property. Because it was not consistent with the historical understanding that title to real estate was held only subject to the State’s subsequent decision to eliminate all economically beneficial use, a regulation having that effect could not be newly decreed without compensation’s being paid the owner. However, no compensation was owed if the State’s affirmative decree simply made explicit what already inhered in the title itself, in the restrictions that background principles of the State’s law of property and nuisance already placed upon land ownership. Although it seemed unlikely that common law principles would have prevented the erection of any habitable or productive improvements on Lucas’s land, this state law question must be dealt with on remand. To win its case, however, the respondent could not simply proffer the legislature’s declaration that the uses Lucas desired were inconsistent with the public interest. The respondent would have had to identify background principles of nuisance and property law that prohibited the uses Lucas now intended in the property’s present circumstances. The decision was therefore reversed and remanded.