For decades, Randy and Kim Pavlock have owned their home in Porter Beach, Indiana, and used their private beach along Lake Michigan for countless family events and recreation. They have made improvements on it and enjoyed it because it was their home; or so they thought. In 2018, the Indiana Supreme Court held that all lakefront property below the ordinary high-water mark belonged to the State. The Pavlocks were devastated. A cherished part of their long-held property, the lakefront they had enjoyed, was now public property to be used equally by strangers. This is precisely what the Framers thought they had made impossible by the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

The Foundation for Moral Law has filed an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the Pavlocks. The Pavlocks, petitioning the Supreme Court to hear their case, have presented an excellent and compelling argument that their property has been taken, that this taking constitutes an injury, and that the Constitution affords them a remedy. In support of this, the Foundation has explained that the State’s actions violate the Fifth Amendment as intended by its Framers. The Foundation’s amicus brief examines the sources of the Framers’ views of property and eminent domain and cites the formative influences on their thought: the Bible and judicial philosophers. It demonstrates that each of these has a high view of property rights and a low view of eminent domain, and even cites a case of eminent domain from the Old Testament.

The brief concludes: “The possibility that often-unelected judges could confiscate property without compensation when neither the legislative branch nor the executive branch could do so would have seemed bizarre to the Framers of the Constitution. . . . The Pavlocks and their fellow Petitioners are good faith purchasers, owners, occupiers, and taxpayers of property that they believed in good faith belonged to them and that has been taken from them by judicial fiat in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.”

Read the brief here.