EMINENT DOMAIN

The recent supreme court decision in New London, Conn. is a chilling blow to property rights, but the door was opened by the framers of the Fifth Amendment. Eminent domain is a statist doctrine. It is an assertion of sovereignty that goes back to absolute monarchs of antiquity. The word originated at the beginning of the 17th century, interestingly enough, when powerful modern European monarchies were developing the modern nation-states. Eminent domain assumes the ownership of all by the state; ownership and sovereignty that originate in and ultimately remain in the state or its monarch. Private property is then not a right but a holding derived from the sovereign state, and eminent domain is the reassertion of ownership by the state and sovereign power. Like all legal and political theories based on natural law, its historical argument is an artificial construct. It is a theory based not on precedent, but on a mythological historical development.