Kevin Quinn, et al. v. Board of County Commissioners for Queen Anne's County, Maryland, et al.

Last term, in Murr v. Wisconsin, 137 S. Ct. 1933 (2017), eight members of this Court established a multifactor test in regulatory takings cases for determining whether legally distinct, but commonly owned contiguous parcels of property, must be combined for takings analysis purposes. Under Murr, to determine the proper unit of property against which to assess the effect of a challenged regulatory action, courts must consider three factors: (i) the treatment of the land under state and local law; (ii) the physical characteristics of the land; and (iii) the prospective value of the regulated land. Here, the Fourth Circuit rejected Petitioners’ Takings Clause challenge to a local ordinance that forces the merger of separate parcels simply because they are commonly owned and contiguous to one another. Instead of defining the relevant parcel by applying the Murr multifactor test, the court considered only the parcels’ physical characteristics and ignored the treatment of the parcels under state and local law, the factor that “should [be] give[n] substantial weight.” As a result, the court incorrectly defined the parcels impacted by the ordinance as the parcels post-merger. The question presented is: Whether, under the multifactor test set forth in Murr, a merger ordinance’s impact should be assessed against separate parcels pre-merger when those parcels were purchased as individually platted, recorded, and taxed lots decades before the ordinance became effective.