Kelo v. City of New London

Majority reasoning

The majority, led by Justice Stevens, held that the Court has long rejected a literal "use by the public" test in favor of a broader "public purpose" standard, tracing this through cases like Berman v. Parker and Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff. It reasoned that promoting economic development is a traditional government function and there is no principled way to distinguish it from other public purposes the Court has already approved, such as agriculture, mining, or slum clearance. The majority emphasized that courts owe deference to legislative judgments about what public needs justify eminent domain, and that the City's plan here was comprehensive, carefully deliberated, and not a pretext to benefit a particular private party since the trial court and Connecticut Supreme Court both found no evidence of an illegitimate purpose. The Court declined to adopt a bright-line rule excluding economic development takings or to require "reasonable certainty" that projected public benefits would materialize, reasoning that such an approach would improperly force courts to second-guess legislative and agency judgments. Responding to Justice O'Connor's dissent, the majority rejected the theory that a taking must eliminate some "harmful" prior use to qualify as public, noting that nothing "harmful" characterized the properties taken in Berman, the mining cases, or Monsanto, yet those takings were upheld.

Dissent reasoning

Justice O'Connor, joined by Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas, argued that the ruling erases the distinction between "public use" and "public benefit," effectively deleting the words "for public use" from the Fifth Amendment since virtually any private use can be said to generate some incidental public benefit. She argued Berman and Midkiff were properly limited to situations where the prior use of the property caused an affirmative public harm—blight or land oligopoly—which the government was directly remedying, unlike here where petitioners' homes were not blighted or harmful in any way. She warned that under the majority's rule, any property could now be taken and transferred to a new private owner simply because a legislature deems the new use more economically beneficial, meaning no property is safe from condemnation, with the burden falling disproportionately on citizens with less political power. Justice Thomas, dissenting separately, argued that the term "public use" was originally understood at the founding to mean actual use or legal access by the government or public, not any conceivably beneficial "public purpose," and that the Court's line of precedent starting with Fallbrook Irrigation Dist. v. Bradley adopted this looser standard through unreasoned dicta without examining the Clause's text or history. He contended that the "public purpose" test improperly duplicates the Necessary and Proper Clause inquiry, erroneously equates the eminent domain power with the police power, and cannot be applied in a principled manner, and he further argued that the consequences of such takings fall disproportionately on poor and minority communities based on historical urban renewal patterns.