From the WSJ:
The Supreme Court waded into a property-rights dispute Wednesday, weighing whether Florida can restore eroded beaches in front of private homes and designate the newly emerged beach as public property.
Erosion threatens nearly 59% of Florida's 825 miles of sandy beaches, according to the state's Department of Environmental Protection. Under a 1961 law, the state dredges sand from one area and dumps it on another, expanding the width of a threatened beach.
Six property owners in Walton County, banding together as Stop the Beach Renourishment Inc., argue that they should own the new beach and visitors shouldn't be allowed to spread their towels on it. The owners say their deeds entitle them to all land up to the mean high water line, including the additional 80 to 100 feet of beach the state added.
SCOTUSBlog's preview of the case provides additional background. More from Ilya Somin here.
What I wonder is, what would the case look like if brought under FTA/BIT investment provisions? In theory, if any of the affected homeowners are citizens of countries that are parties to an FTA/BIT with the U.S., they could bring a similar claim there.
For a critical look at this kind of case, see the new book The Expropriation of Environmental Governance: Protecting Foreign Investors at the Expense of Public Policy, from Cambridge University Press. From the abstract:
Recent years have seen an explosive increase in investor-state disputes resolved in international arbitration. This is significant not only in terms of the number of disputes that have arisen and the number of states that have been involved, but also in terms of the novel types of dispute that have emerged. Traditionally, investor-state disputes resulted from straightforward incidences of nationalisation or breach of contract. In contrast, modern disputes frequently revolve around government measures taken to further public policy goals, such as the protection of the environment. This book explores the outcomes of several investor-state disputes over environmental policy. In addition to examining the pleadings of parties and decisions of arbitral tribunals in disputes that have been resolved in arbitration, the influence that investment arbitration has had in negotiated outcomes to conflicts is also explored.
