Nollan v. California Coastal Commission

Nollan belonged to a trend in favor of property rights, a reaction to the statist movement that had begun in the era of Roosevelt and the New Deal. (The latter was in turn a reaction to abuses by big business in the name of private property during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) After Nollan, landowners gained more victories in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council (1992) and Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994). In the first of these, the Court upheld a landowner's right to receive compensation for a government coastal protection plan which rendered his land virtually unusable; in the second, the Court held that local governments must show "rough proportionality" between the conditions they imposed on people developing their land, and the alleged evils these conditions were intended to address. The issues raised in Nollan continue to be volatile ones, particularly in an era fraught with environmental concerns which encourage governments to place severe restrictions on land use--or even, in some disputed cases, to entirely deprive individuals of their land in the interests of protecting an endangered species.