David H. Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council (505 U.S. 1003)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 29, 1992 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 505 U.S. 1003 · 112 S. Ct. 2886
- Decided
- June 29, 1992
- Term
- October Term 1991
- Vote
- 6–3
- Majority author
- Justice Scalia
- Issue area
- Due Process
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court. In 1986, petitioner David H. Lucas paid $976,000 for two residential lots on the Isle of Palms in Charleston County, South Carolina, on which he intended to build single-family homes. In 1988, however, the South Carolina Legislature enacted the Beachfront Management Act, S. C. Code Ann. § 48-39-250 et seq. (Supp. 1990), which had the direct effect of barring petitioner from erecting any permanent habitable structures on his two parcels.' See §48-39-290(A). A state trial court found that this prohibition rendered Lucas’s parcels "valueless.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 37. This case requires us to decide whether the Act’s dramatic effect on the economic value of Lucas’s lots accomplished a taking of private property under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments requiring the payment of “just compensation.” U. S. Const., Arndt. 5. I A South Carolina’s expressed interest in intensively managing development activities in the so-called “coastal zone” dates from 1977 when, in the aftermath of Congress’s passage of the federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972, 86 Stat. 1280, as amended, 16 U. S. C. § 1451 et seq., the legislature enacted a Coastal Zone Management Act of its own. See S. C. Code Ann. § 48-39-10 et seq. (1987). In its original form, the South Carolina Act required owners of coastal zone land that qualified as a “critical…
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