The Armstrong Evolution

Michael Pappas

According to the Supreme Court, the central tenet of modern Fifth Amendment takings jurisprudence is as follows:

“[T]he Fifth Amendment’s guarantee . . . was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public bur- dens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the pub- lic as a whole.”1

Taken from Armstrong v. United States, the above quote is termed “the Armstrong principle,” and it has appeared in thousands of takings cases. It stresses the ideas of comparative fairness and justice and leads courts to in- quire whether individual property owners have been “singled out” to bear outsized burdens.