Title
Making Something Out of Nothing: The Law of Takings and Phillips v. Washington Legal Foundation
Document Type
Working Paper
Publication Date
1999
Abstract
Phillips v. Washington Legal Foundation, 118 S Ct 1925 (1998), held that interest generated by the Texas Interest on Lawyers Trust Account (IOLTA) program is the "private property" of the clients who handed over the principal; the Court did not decide whether the IOLTA program worked a "taking," or, if it did, what "just compensation" was due. The debates among the justices about the meaning of private property, argued in terms of contextual and conceptual severance, are unlikely to prove fruitful. We elaborate a better approach that looks to the underlying purposes of just compensation: efficiency and justice are best served by uncoupling matters and methods of deterrence from matters and methods of distribution.
Disciplines
Constitutional Law | Law | Law and Economics | Property Law and Real Estate
Recommended Citation
Michael Heller & James E. Krier,
Making Something Out of Nothing: The Law of Takings and Phillips v. Washington Legal Foundation,
Supreme Court Economic Review, Vol. 7, p. 285, 1999
(1999).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1189
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Property Law and Real Estate Commons