The Horne California Raisin Case Is Back In the Supreme Court

Not much we can add to this headline. You no doubt remember the recent Horne case, in which the Supreme Court vacated the opinion of the 9th Circuit and sent the case back with directions to consider the Hornes’ claim of taking of a chunk of their raisin crop or else pay a fine north of $400,000. The 9th Circuit still couldn’t find a taking in this scenario, and hung tough — it more or less defied the Supreme Court and once again held that this physical seizure of the Hornes’ raisin crop was not a taking within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment.

The Hornes petitioned the Supreme Court for certiorari, which the court just granted. So it’s off to the races again.

Oral arguments should take place sometime later in the year and it is likely that a [second] SCOTUS decision will come down later in the year, probably by the end of June. Last time, the subtext of the court’s [first] opinion revealed — at least to us — that the court was not pleased with the government’s conduct whereby its physical seizure of tons of privately owned raisins and the resale of them in order to keep raisin prices up, without paying their owner a nickel. That weird legislative scheme was concocted in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s, as a means of keeping raisin prices up, and thereby keep raisin farmers from going broke. But it makes no sense today, and it was ridiculed during the last oral argument by none other than Justice Kagan, usually reliably lined up with the court’s liberal justices.

So stay tuned, folks. This one should be fun.

Follow up. Actually, this post should be called a “non-follow-up” if there is such a word. We understand that the same-sex marriage cases are of greater interest to more people than takings law, and understandably they take the lion’s share of SCOTUSblog publicity. But, hey, man. When a lower court pretty much defies the Supreme Court and sticks to the result achieved in its earlier, vacated decision, that might be of interest to SCOTUSblog readers. Yes? But evidently that’s not how our betters think. Other than a bare mention of the fact that cert was granted in the Horne case, we have not been able to find any SCOTUSblog reference to Horne, except a statement of the Issues Presented.