Professor Richard Epstein, formerly of Chicago U and now at NYU, has a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, in which he expresses the hope that the Supreme Court will grant certiorari in a rent control case from New York. We wish him luck but we are not holding our breath. SCOTUS had an opportunity to deal with this wretched subject in the Pennell and Yee cases, which were up there on the merits, but eventually chickened out. More recently, it had a chance in the Guggenheim case in which the 9th Circuit de facto overruled the Supreme Court, but certiorari was denied.
So while we wish bon chance to the petitioner, and offer our support (which these days carries the weight of a fly turd) to Professor Epstein’s view on this point of law, we are pessimistic about that one. In our admittedly curmudgeonly view, the chances of cert being granted in a rent control case are about the same as the chances of your faithfu servant flying to New York to visit Professor Epstein, by flapping his arms.
For a link to Prof Epstein’s piece, click here http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204464404577118912082926658.html