PLF MADE ITS MARK at the Supreme Court of the United States defending private property rights as protected by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and we hope to add to our proud record in a case from the Florida Keys known as Ganson v. City of Marathon.

Here, government officials in Florida determined that Gordon and Molly Beyer, longtime owners of a nine-acre piece of developable property in the Keys, could not develop their property—an island known as Bamboo Key—because the island made for a fine bird rookery. The officials designated the Key (along with other properties) environmentally sensitive and cut the property off from any development.

The officials then decided they did not have to pay the Beyers for this taking despite having rendered Bamboo Key uninhabitable (well, except for birds). Instead, the officials awarded the Beyers “credits” they could ostensibly sell or use themselves (by buying additional land) to seek a development permit elsewhere in the Keys on lands not as environmentally sensitive. But any wise investor will tell you these credits were basically valueless because the government did not guarantee the Beyers (or anyone else) that it would honor the credits and allow development elsewhere.

Despite the obvious injustice, the Florida courts have refused to right this constitutional wrong. For this reason, we have asked the Supreme Court to hear the case.

Our friends at the Cato Institute described the government’s unconstitutional action in this case very well in their friend of the court brief supporting our cause:

“If you take a child’s toy in exchange for the promise of a piece of candy that the child will not be able to eat, but may be able to trade sometime in the future, is it still a taking? Yes—and this is also true of real property.”

So many times the cases PLF has argued and won at the Supreme Court could similarly be described by way of an analogy to children’s candy. Whether it be Nollan v. California Coastal Commission—where the child with the candy was told he could not eat his candy unless he gave a portion of it away each and every day to the other children for free and forever—or more recently in Murr v. State of Wisconsin—where the Supreme Court decided a child with two pieces of candy could not exchange one with a friend because the two pieces had melted into one by virtue of government magic—the beauty of our cases often can be found in their simplicity.

The high court will consider our petition later this year. Let’s hope the nine former children at the Supreme Court understand this simple case and demand the City of Marathon justly compensate the Beyers for the piece of very valuable candy in the Florida Keys that the city took away from them.

“If you take a child’s toy in exchange for the promise of a piece of candy that the child will not be able to eat, but may be able to trade sometime in the future, is it still a taking? Yes—and this is also true of real property.”

Cato Institute