In a new article type for our blog – which we’re calling “Right of Way Reads” – we’ll be offering a potpourri, a word salad if you will, of short form topics in the same article, things that might otherwise not need an entire article and be more suitable for a certain short form blog site. However, since we don’t feel like posting them on said site given the “eminent domaining” of Twitter into X, we’ll put them here. Yes, we know a corporate rebranding is not eminent domain, but somehow there seem to be people who think that particular corporate rebranding somehow involves eminent domain, further evidencing the online slide of “eminent domain” from a term of art into a generic term for some sort of unpleasantness with feelings, however unwarranted, of theft. Regardless, on to the following bullet points:

 

 

  • Eminent Domain and UFO’s?  While one can think of any number of ways for the Federal government to approach obtaining ownership of evidence of UFO’s or recovered technologies of unknown origin, the one proposed is … eminent domain? The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure Act of 2023 provides in part “DISCLOSURE OF RECOVERED TECHNOLOGIES OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN AND BIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF NON-HUMAN INTELLIGENCE. (a) EXERCISE OF EMINENT DOMAIN.—The Federal Government shall exercise eminent domain over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interests of the public good.” One questions if the people proposing said bill remember that eminent domain requires paying just compensation for the property taken, but one would have to imagine that the price for said property would be high, sky high even, pun intended.

 

  • AI’s still busily hallucinating.  If you didn’t know, AI’s, or large language models, have a tendency to make up facts that suit the prompt, which has been dubbed “hallucinating.” If you somehow missed out on the Avianca drama where attorneys were fined for submitting bogus case law hallucinated by chatGPT,  take this as your warning against wholesale adoption of AI into legal work. More recently I saw some Twitter (no I’m not going to call it X) posts touting claude.ai as superior to chatGPT. I figured I would give it a try to see if the hallucination problem exists on this other platform. In an attempt to avoid writing this blog piece myself if I didn’t have to, I asked it to provide me with five funny or interesting recent events involving eminent domain. The first item it reported was “The city of Springfield recently tried to seize Moe’s Tavern through eminent domain, claiming the property was “blighted.” Moe fought back, arguing the bar is a historic landmark – the city eventually backed down after much public outcry.” Let’s just say the quality and reality of the subsequent events reported did not improve from there.

 

  • Word Salad, noun i) a confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases, specifically (in psychiatry) as a form of speech indicative of advanced schizophrenia; ii) a Right of Way Blog section for building your vocabulary or just remembering words you heard one time but had forgotten about.

Unexpurgated, adjective – (of a text) complete and containing all the original material; uncensored.

Vexillology, noun – the study of flags.

 

If you enjoyed this article, please feel free to click the subscribe button below if you are not already a subscriber.

Subscribe

Ross Greene is a firm shareholder and chair of the firm’s Eminent Domain / Right of Way Practice Group. He focuses his practice in the areas of eminent domain, right of way, real estate, wills, trusts, estates, and business matters.