Eminent domain receives enormous amounts of scholarly and popular attention, and for good reason—it is a powerful form of government coercion that cuts to the heart of ownership. But a mirror-image form of government coercion has been almost entirely ignored: forced ownership, or “forcings.” While legal compulsion to begin or continue ownership is neither entirely...
When the government exercises its power of eminent domain to take private property, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that the property’s owners receive “just compensation,” which the Supreme Court has defined as equal to the property’s fair market value. Today, a well-established consensus exists on three basic propositions about this fair market value standard. First, the standard systematically undercompensates...