Here’s a recently-filed cert petition raising questions in a challenge to Los Angeles’ County’s imposition of ban on commercial evictions during Co-19. A lot of other jurisdictions around the country imposed eviction restrictions or prohibitions on residential properties, but LA County stood alone in restricting commercial evictions.
This one asks whether a party is categorically barred from asserting a claim that a local government impaired a contract solely because other jurisdictions had adopted or were adopting similar restrictions (although here, those restrictions affected only residential leases), and thus had no expectation of having his contract unimpaired.
This is out of our shop, so we’re not going to say much more about it except to post the Question Presented:
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the County of Los Angeles enacted a moratorium that prohibited commercial landlords from, among other things, evicting defaulting tenants and demanding immediate payment of overdue rent. Petitioner, a retired auto mechanic and small commercial landlord who suffered substantial losses by the moratorium, brought suit to challenge it as an unconstitutional “Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts,” U.S. Const. art. I, § 10. The district court dismissed Petitioner’s complaint for failure to state a claim, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed, both on the sole ground that the moratorium’s enactment and application to Petitioner’s lease contract was foreseeable. In contrast, this Court, followed by other lower courts, has used foreseeability as merely one, non-determinative factor to be considered in deciding whether a party has advanced a viable Contracts Clause claim. See, e.g., Sveen v. Melin, 584 U.S. 811, 820-24 (2018); City of El Paso v....
