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Eminent Domain

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Individual Property Rights vs Eminent Domain

These days there have been many issues surrounding the topic of private property and eminent domain. I feel that eminent domain is a good way to keep the needs of the community and each person’s individual property rights balanced. Even though I believe individual property rights are more important that the needs of the community, I also believe the government sometimes has to take that property away for the better good of the community. At the same time I also understand how people feel when they talk about “NIMBY” (not in my back yard), and also about their personal needs.

Let me take you back into the history of the American land. After the 18th century, Americans turned their backs …show more content…

This compensation was not seen in the case with the English and the Indians. These public uses have normally been railroads, highways, bridges, parks ext. Lately this eminent domain has been used for things completely different. An example is in Pittsburgh, property owners are fighting to keep their land from being taken away to build malls, casino’s and factories. This is one of the many examples of the abuse of eminent domain.

This is where NIMBY is introduced. NIMBY, which stands for “not in my backyard” is used to 1. “Express opposition by local citizens to the locating in their neighborhood of a civic project.” Some examples of these “civic projects” are: a jail, garbage dump, drug rehabilitation center, or anything that the community considers unsightly, dangerous and likely to lead to property values decreasing. From this is how they derived the compensation and eminent domain laws.

It is strange how they come up with these laws to compensate you after they have taken your land. This is where we come to the development of the property law. How did the protection of your private property come about? Protection and content are given to the ownership of property by custom or law. The type of property law in a society may be taken as an index of its social and economic system. Even though there is a difference between realty and personality. Realty is chiefly land and improvements built thereon. Sometimes it is loosely

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