Venn Squatting, Camping, Taking

Inspired by the deep affection our Vice President has for Venn diagrams, I’m thinking one up. It’s an overlap of takings, homeless camp and squatting cases. It’s not boring, dang it!  It’s wondrous Venn fun. Yeah, Baby.  I’ll prepare an ‘analysis’ to put on the Longer Promps page as soon as I figure it out more better. For now, here is the drift. Lately a number of interesting cases have reached or are coming out of the Supreme Court, all of which could be thrown into a ‘property’ bucket. Indeed, they generally are not thrown into that bucket. American/English jurisprudence has long categorized actions into what some might see as stovepipes of vocabulary, legal theory and precedence. A case might be considered Landlord/Tennant, Civil Rights, Real Property Taking, etc.  If a case reaches the Supremes, it’s usually if not always because a lawyer has a theory tying the facts to a particular part of the US Constitution, and that obviously lends to the categorizing. Easy thing for me mentally is to just throw them all into the property vat (into what I guess is like a gooey liquid Venn stew) and think about how one property right slurps up against another.  C’mon, it’s not that sloppy. A game I play in my addled little head is to have a variety of cases all occur hypothetically in the same jurisdiction at the same time so as to imagine the conflict of property rights more easily.  I sooth myself in the knowledge that the various constitutional documents and contemporaneous communications among the founders mention ‘property’ a whole lot, even while they give short shrift to ‘democracy.’  So what I want to do is, for instance, chop up the City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson; Sheetz v. County of El Dorado, California; and the New York Andaloro case, which has not risen to US Supreme Court status, at least not yet. If you have any advice or even a lumpy opinion, fire away.