[DOWNLOAD] "Judicial Review of Local Land Use Decisions: Lessons from RLUIPA." by Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Judicial Review of Local Land Use Decisions: Lessons from RLUIPA.
- Author : Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 358 KB
Description
This Article questions whether traditional judicial deference to local land use regulators is justified in light of the highly discretionary, and often corrupt, modern system of land use regulation. In 2000, Congress determined, first, that unlike other forms of economic legislation, land use regulation lacks objective, generally applicable standards, leaving zoning officials with unlimited discretion in granting or denying zoning applications, and second, that this unlimited discretion lends itself to religious discrimination. Congress therefore enacted the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which requires courts to apply strict scrutiny review to land use decisions that impact religious land uses. Since its enactment, the constitutionality of RLUIPA has been debated extensively. Many scholars maintain that the statute is an overly broad exemption that creates a privileged class of land users and allows religious institutions to avoid a community's reasonable land use concerns. In contrast, this Article argues that in enacting RLUIPA, Congress identified a global flaw in land use regulation that impacts all land users, but limited its remedy to religious land users. While RLUIPA's strict scrutiny review is clearly inappropriate for land use cases that involve neither fundamental rights nor suspect classes, traditional judicial deference is equally inappropriate in light of the discretionary nature of modern zoning. Fortunately, the Supreme Court established the appropriate standard of review in its earliest zoning cases. This Article thus maintains that RLUIPA is significant because it highlights a fundamental flaw in local land use regulation, and because its bifurcated approach to judicial review of zoning decisions revives an early facial/as-applied dichotomy in land use jurisprudence and encourages more meaningful judicial review of all as-applied land use decisions.