Nollan v. California Coastal Commission

Thomas Jefferson expressed in the Declaration of Independence that no man should be stripped of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In its original formulation, however, by the British philosopher John Locke, the last of these had been "the pursuit of property." Constitutional protection of these rights is embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which continues in part that " . . . nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Nollan figured into a late twentieth-century movement to reestablish property rights, which had first begun to suffer under the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.