Keith Allen Kiefer v. Isanti County, Minnesota

A county’s rural agricultural land-use laws completely prohibit outdoor storage use of personal property – a “noneconomic interest” – while permitting unlimited outdoor storage relating to permitted, conditional, and other uses. Hence, an arbitrary group of property owners with only an outdoor storage use lose a benefit of property ownership. In this case, Isanti County has obtained a court order to physically remove Petitioner’s outdoor storage based on such an ordinance. In Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003, 1019 n.8 (1992), this Court stated that “there are plainly a number of noneconomic interests in land whose impairment will invite exceedingly close scrutiny under the Takings Clause. See, e.g., Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp., 458 U.S. 419, 436 . . . (1982) (interest in excluding strangers from one’s land).” Since 2005, the state courts have applied the Court’s decision in Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A. Inc., 544 U.S. 528 (2005). However, Lingle never specifically addressed whether Lucas’s exceedingly close scrutiny on impairment of possessory property rights still applies under the Takings Clause. 1. Whether Lingle overturned Lucas’s noneconomic interests doctrine under the Takings Clause which requires exceedingly close scrutiny of physical impairments of possessory property rights.