Agins v. City of Tiburon

Abstract

Last March the California Supreme Court ruled that it would not grant monetary damages to plaintiffs who claim that government land use regulations deprive them of substantially all uses of their property. In Agins v. City of Tiburon, 153 Cal. Rptr. 224, 31 ZD 196, the plaintiffs argued that they should be awarded damages since Tiburon's zoning regulations, enacted in accordance with the city's open space plan, limited the number of houses they could build on their land. The September 1979 issue of LUL/ZD (Vol. 31, No. 9) included an article by Robert Girard entitled Agins: A Step in the Right Direction. Girard, professor of law at Stanford University, argued that courts should not award damages under the just compensation clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments. The following comments are responses to that article, along with a reply by Girard.