It turns out that the Stevens papers contain four large folders of material about Kelo! Within the next 24 hours, copies of these files will be in my possession, and I hope they will shed light on a number of unanswered questions about the case. Having written a book about Kelo, I have an obvious interest in these issues. But they are also likely to be of interest to other scholars, people interested in property rights issues, and others.
We actually already know a lot about Justice Stevens’ thinking about Kelo, because he spoke and wrote about the subject extensively after he retired from Supreme Court in 2010. In a 2011 speech about the case and in his memoirs, published in 2019, Stevens admitted he had made a “somewhat embarrassing to acknowledge” error in his majority opinion, by misinterpreting precedent. He generously cited me as a “scholarly commentator” who “caught this issue shortly after we decided Kelo,” in an article I published in 2007. But Stevens continued to believe he got the result right, albeit for reasons very different from the rationale outlined in his majority opinion.
Despite these revelations, there are still a number of unanswered questions about the case that the Stevens papers may shed light on. Here are some things I hope to learn[.]
[I’ll be very interested to see if Somin finds answers to these questions in the papers of Justice Stevens. Whatever he finds, though, there is no doubting that the Kelo decision was a massive miscarriage of justice, an abomination for private property rights, and nothing more than judicially sanctioned theft from Suzanne Kelo. If you haven’t yet seen it, watch Ted Balaker’s excellent dramatization of the case, “Little Pink House,” starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn. — Ed]
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