CONSTITUTIONAL LAW-FIFTH AMENDMENT-EMINENT DOMAIN

Merritts v. Richards, 2023 U.S. App. LEXIS 6267 (3d Cir. March 16, 2023) (Phipps, C.J.) This case involved a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with respect to PennDOT’s lacking title to possession of easements. Merritts’s legal injuries related to the acquisition of the easements. The court is satisfied that Merritts’s unlawful acquisition claims should have been judicially dismissed without prejudice. For the foregoing reasons, the Third Circuit vacated the District Court’s judgment and remanded to the District Court with instruction to adjudicate the just compensation related to 1983 claims for damages against PennDOT officials in their individual capacities and dismiss all other claims without prejudice. The Rooker-Feldman doctrine does not require the dismissal of the 1983 claims against individual-capacity defendants related to just compensation. Merritts’s 1983 claims for damages premised on the allegedly unlawful acquisition of the easements meet the four conditions for dismissal under Rooker-Feldman, but his claims for denial of just compensation and conspiracy to deny just compensation do not. The District Court overextended Burford abstention, treating it as encompassing any challenge to the exercise of a state’s eminent domain power. Although eminent domain is “intimately involved with sovereign prerogative”, that alone does not suffice for Burford abstention. Burford abstention protects “complex state administrative processes”.