Few things make liberal court commentators more uneasy than the fact that in the extremely unpopular Kelo v. New London decision, the five most liberal judges were on the side of big business and the three conservative judges were on the side of the little guy. Indeed, Justice John Paul Stevens, arguably the most liberal of the nine, wrote the big-business-big-government decision.
Well, Sotomayor’s record also seems to come down on the side of the Bigs against landowners. Richard Epstein in Forbes describes one of her rulings:
The case involved about as naked an abuse of government power as could be imagined. Bart Didden came up with an idea to build a pharmacy on land he owned in a redevelopment district in Port Chester over which the town of Port Chester had given Greg Wasser control. Wasser told Didden that he would approve the project only if Didden paid him $800,000 or gave him a partnership interest. The “or else” was that the land would be promptly condemned by the village, and Wasser would put up a pharmacy himself. Just that came to pass. But the Second Circuit panel on which Sotomayor sat did not raise an eyebrow. Its entire analysis reads as follows: “We agree with the district court that [Wasser’s] voluntary attempt to resolve appellants’ demands was neither an unconstitutional exaction in the form of extortion nor an equal protection violation.”
At Reason, Radley Balko chimes in, ” ‘[V]oluntary attempt to resolve appellants’ demands’ is one way of putting it. ‘State-sanctioned extortion’ is another”
