The government stole their property… now the Perez family is fighting home equity theft

Six years ago, Erica Perez and her father, Romualdo, purchased a small, $60,000 apartment complex in Detroit. Romualdo has family there, so they planned to fix up the complex to rent out, as well as a small home next door where they would move when he retires. This property was their family legacy and their American Dream.

But as Christina Martin explains, Wayne County ripped all that away. They seized the Perez property, sold it for $108,000, and kept all the profits.

The Perezes’ offense? They unwittingly underpaid their property taxes by $144.

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PLF in the Los Angeles Times: Setting quotas on women in the boardroom is probably unconstitutional; it also doesn’t work

California recently became the first state in the nation to require publicly traded companies to include women on their boards of directors. Now Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts appear poised to establish their own “woman quotas.” While undoubtedly well-intentioned, these mandates are likely to be struck down in court. And that’s a good thing.

As Anastasia Boden explains, while quotas may add a handful of women to corporate boards, they come at the expense of the broader goal of equality, which requires not equal numbers, but equal dignity for women.

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Final victory for Edward Poitevent and property rights

On July 3, 2019, a federal court delivered a huge win to Louisiana property owners Edward Poitevent and his family in a long-running national battle over property rights and the reach of the Endangered Species Act.

The settlement marks the complete capitulation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and invalidates its wrongful decision to designate 1,500 acres of property as critical habitat for the dusky gopher frog, a species that did not—and could not—live on the Poitevent property.
 
The victory puts an appropriate finishing touch on a case that culminated in November 2018 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Weyerhaeuser Co. v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in favor of private property rights.

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