Murr v. Wisconsin
United States Supreme Court
137 S. Ct. 1933 (2017)
The Murrs (plaintiffs) owned two adjacent, narrow, bluff-and-riverbank tracts along the St. Croix River — one owned individually and one by their company — and Wisconsin's (defendant) minimum-lot-size rule, whose grandfather clause did not apply to adjacent commonly owned lots, prohibited developing the undersized Lot E once the company conveyed its lot to the Murrs, merging the parcels for development purposes; the combined lot was worth more than the sum of the two individual lots. The Murrs sued, claiming an uncompensated regulatory taking because they could not develop Lot E separately; the lower Wisconsin courts ruled for the state, and the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
Whether, where a landowner owns adjacent tracts of land, the tracts constitute one parcel for purposes of the Takings Clause if the owner's reasonable expectations about property ownership would lead him to expect that his holdings would be treated as one parcel.