Eminent Domain Report

It's not often a film comes out dealing with eminent domain issues.  You may remember when Avatar came out, my partner Rick Rayl and our esteemed colleague Gideon Kanner had a nice back-and-forth spar about whether the film had anything to do with eminent domain.  (Rick ended up buying Professor Kanner a movie ticket in the hopes of changing his mind.)  

Well, there can be no dispute about the eminent domain context in the recent documentary "Battle for Brooklyn," which follows a man's fight to save his Atlantic Yards neighborhood from condemnation for the New Jersey Nets' new basketball ...

This never would have happened five years ago.  A small game company is advertising its latest offering, Eminent Domain, a card game based on the colonization of various planets.

It's hard to imagine a game called "Eminent Domain" before the 2005 Kelo decision made the phrase ubiquitous in American conversation.  Heck, I'm an eminent domain attorney and I'm not convinced I had a clear understanding of what eminent domain was when I graduated from law school.

More interestingly, the title has generated a somewhat heated debate among gamers as to whether the game's true purpose is ...

Yesterday, Professor Gideon Kanner, a well-known eminent domain scholar, wrote a critique of my post about Avatar on his "Gideon's Trumpet" blog.  It is an interesting response, in that it spans two full pages of printed text, and his fundamental point seems to be that he agrees with my premise that Avatar is not a film about eminent domain.  

How, then, does he spend two pages responding to my January 26 post, "Is Avatar Really a Political Commentary on Eminent Domain Abuse?"  Well, he begins by "trumpeting" the fact that he writes from an "unabashedly property-owner oriented" ...

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to see Avatar.  With two young kids, we rarely see movies in the theaters, and we picked this one based on its advertised special effects, not any belief that it was the "best" movie among our choices.  

As I watched, I never really thought of it as an expression of outrage over eminent domain abuse.  Looking around the Internet, however, the movie seems to have been picked up by eminent domain reformists as a big budget example of eminent domain gone bad.  But is it, really?  Let's look at some facts ...